by Marc Cameron
“That would be my guess,” Feng said. He was already working on the map, both hands moving with the pen across the yellow legal pad since they were cuffed together.
Bourke shot a sideways glance at Callahan. “Matarife means ‘slaughterer.’”
Callahan rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. This whole thing made her bones tired. There was a reason agents timed out of Crimes Against Children task forces. Her supervisor had warned her after her last emotional outburst that she was definitely coming to the end of her shelf life with the CAC.
Feng kept at his drawing, hunched over the legal pad. “I’ve never met him, but I hear Matarife is into some pretty nasty stuff.”
“Be more specific,” Bourke said.
Eddie shrugged. “I am actually onto something else for my story, so all this stuff with the girls was just extra. Believe me, once I got what I needed, I was going to make some calls and get the girls out of there.”
“Must have been really important,” Bourke said, “for you to leave them in slavery while you got your precious story.”
“You have no idea.” Feng hung his head. “But I understand how it looks . . . how it is. I should have called someone.”
“Yes, you should have, Eddie,” Callahan said. “But you can make a difference now. Let’s get back to what you know about Matarife.”
“All I heard was whispers. Rumor is he leads some kind of blood cult, but I think that’s just a story to scare the shit out of the competition. I haven’t put it together yet, but he’s somehow linked to a guy they call Coronet. That’s who I’m looking to find, Coronet. I suspect he works with a contact in mainland China. Sun Yee On triad, Tres Equis, Coronet—and the PRC. They’re all connected. I just haven’t put it all together yet.”
“Well, shit,” Callahan said. This was starting to spin out of her control. If it got too big, then Violent Crimes or one of the counterintel squads would muscle her out. “So tell me, Eddie. How do we find Matarife?”
Feng looked up from his map, which was incredibly detailed considering that he was drawing it with his hands cuffed. “He’s supposed to have a big house out in the country.”
Callahan pounded the table again. “Where is this big house?”
Feng shrugged. “Still working on that,” he said. “I haven’t managed to get myself invited out there. Until you arrested me, though, my next stop was a mid-level guy named Naldo Cantu who owns a string of massage parlors in South Dallas. He’s a real piece of work, just brutal to his girls. He keeps them strung out to keep them under control. Burns them with cigars for entertainment . . .” Feng shook his head, as if to clear away the image. “I know he pays a fee to operate in Matarife’s area. He’d have to know how to get in touch with the guy in order to pay him. Cantu will have some girls on hand. He always does. Could be this friend of Blanca’s is with him. I can tell you where he lives.”
“You can?” Callahan said, surprised at a glimmer of positive news.
“Sure,” Feng said.
Callahan patted her hand on the table. “Hurry up, then,” she said. “I’m not done with you yet, but if you know where Naldo Cantu is holding girls, I want to act on it right damn now.”
“Good,” Feng said. “Because there are probably some other things you need to know—”
An electronic buzzer sounded at the door, nearly sending Feng out of his skin. There was a heavy metallic click and Tim Dixon, one of the supervisory agents, entered. He had a tall Starbucks cup in his hand with steam coming off the top—which meant it couldn’t be for Feng. Prisoners got lukewarm coffee at best—in case they decided to try to weaponize their drink.
Feng dropped the pen on the table and rattled his cuffs. “What’s going on? Who is this? Is he one of the guys watching me?”
Callahan snapped her fingers to shush him, then looked up at Dixon, afraid of what his presence meant. Interruptions like this usually meant a lawyer had shown up.
The news turned out to be even worse.
Dixon leaned in to whisper in her ear. “There’s an agent named Caruso here to see you. Apparently, he’s out of WFO.”
“Okay.” Callahan shrugged. “What does somebody from the Washington Field Office want with me?”
“He knows you have Feng in custody,” Dixon said.
Callahan gasped. “We just scooped him up two hours ago.”
Dixon gave her a knowing nod. “Fancy that. And get this, the Old Man got a call from the office of the director about five minutes before this guy slithered in here, telling us to show one Special Agent Dominic Caruso all possible courtesy. He didn’t say it, but I’m thinking he’s gotta be counterintel. You have to admit, Kelsey, this whole case has a CI stink to it.”
Dixon had surely read Callahan’s 302 summarizing the interview with Blanca Limón, and now there was Eddie Feng’s reference to the People’s Republic of China. All this talk of spies and geopolitical competition brought spooks swarming around like blowflies to putrid meat.
Callahan wallowed up out of the prison-industries chair, knocking it over and hoping she smashed it in the process.
“What the hell, Tim? You know this is all wrong. We’re saving kids here, not working on spy shit. All possible courtesy my ass!”
Dixon sipped his coffee. “He’s standing right outside the window.”
“I don’t care where he is.” Callahan yanked open the door. “I will not hand over this investigation to a bunch of Washington counterintel weenies.”
She nearly ran headlong into a dark-haired man wearing faded jeans and a face full of stubble over a passive smile.
He gave her a wink that made her want to punch him in the nose, then said, “I think I can help you with that last part.”
• • •
The contract security officers in the lobby of the fortresslike Dallas field office had checked Caruso’s credentials and assumed he was armed. The magnetometer beeped when he walked through, which was not surprising to the guards. He wasn’t local, but he was an agent, so everyone assumed he would be armed. They did not, however, know that he wore a wire neck loop and microphone connected to the small radio hidden under the tail of his loose shirt and tucked inside the waistband of his jeans. The tiny earpieces Campus operatives wore were designed to blend in, but he’d removed his to be on the safe side. FBI agents were trained to be highly observant, and wearing an obvious wire into the lion’s den was sure to earn him a case of the third degree from the Old Man—the notoriously territorial and protective special agent in charge of the Dallas office. This left Caruso blind to any communication coming from other Campus members but still able to feed pertinent information to them through the mic just out of sight below his collar. He knew it wasn’t quite sensitive enough to pick up everything that was being said around him, so he strategically repeated the important stuff while trying not to sound like too much of an idiot.
“Seriously,” he said, shaking Callahan’s hand as they stood in the hall outside the interrogation room. “You and I have the same goals here.”
Callahan took a step back and folded her arms, giving him an up-and-down once-over. She was attractive, in an I’ll-kick-your-ass sort of way. Her stylish blouse was unbuttoned one button farther than she probably realized. At first glance, her ponytail gave her a look of innocence, but one look from her green eyes warned that she was anything but.
At length, she held out her hand and snapped her fingers. “Let’s see your creds.”
“They checked them downstairs.”
Callahan scoffed. She reminded Caruso of his mother checking his hands for dampness to make sure he’d actually washed them before dinner. “Well, I want to check them again.”
He passed the black leather case to her and shot a glance at Tim Dixon while he waited.
“Don’t look at me for aid and comfort,” the supervisor said. “She just happened to ask
you before I did.”
Callahan studied the ID card and the badge, obviously disappointed that they weren’t fake. “How did you find out about Feng so quickly?” Her lip curled up in disgust. “You must have had him under surveillance, and if that’s the case, why in the hell didn’t you step in and rescue the kids? Could there possibly be anything more important than that?”
Caruso took a deep breath. “First of all, I can’t speak to how I knew. But I can promise you that if I’d seen any children in danger, they would have become my highest priority. I would have gotten them out in a heartbeat.”
Callahan looked at him for a long moment and then handed him back his credentials. “I believe you on that one tiny count, Dominic Caruso. But that doesn’t mean I’m all giddy about having you attached to my hip. And anyway, if you are what I believe you to be, I fully expect you to lie to me at least a dozen times a day.” She turned back to the interrogation room, pausing with her hand on the door. Her eyes softened a notch. “Listen, I know what you’re doing is probably super-duper important in the great scheme of the geopolitical chess game. But the work my team is doing here isn’t a game in any sense of the word. We estimate that there are more slaves in the world today than at any other time in recorded history—and many of them are just kids, being forced to do unspeakable things, sometimes in a rented box truck at some peach orchard servicing a line of migrant workers waiting their turn, sometimes on a webcam. Some piece of trash gets arrested for child porn and their defense attorney boohoos to the judge and says, ‘Oh, Your Honor, my client is just a collector. He would never touch an actual child.’ Well, I say people who collect baseball cards eventually go to a game. People tell me that in adults, at least, prostitution is a victimless crime. Maybe one case in a million they might possibly have a point. But you try and have sex ten or fifteen times a day and see how you feel. Johns are rapists—they just pay somebody for the experience.”
Caruso raised both hands in surrender. “I’m not arguing with you. Really, I am on your side.”
“I just wanted you to know why I’m so bitchy right from the get-go,” Callahan said. “There is so much inertia in this ocean of evil shit that I have to push back or I’ll drown, you know. Anyway, I haven’t quite figured out Eddie Feng’s angle yet. But he’s about to tell us where we can find a guy one step up the ladder in what looks like a major human-trafficking ring. Supposedly there’s some connection to a Chinese guy that goes by the handle of Coronet. That mean anything to you?”
“Coronet?” Caruso said, repeating it so Clark and the others could hear. “I’m interested to hear where we can find a link to him. Mind if I come along?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Caruso grinned. “Not really.”
17
John Clark’s voice crackled over the radio immediately after Caruso repeated Naldo Cantu’s address. “We’ve got about twenty minutes if we’re lucky with traffic,” Clark said. “Everyone jump. I want to see what kind of intel we can grab before they get there.”
“Copy that,” Ryan said. The rest of the team confirmed they’d heard the transmission and were immediately en route.
Interstate 35 was a stone’s throw away from the FBI field office, around which he and the others were strategically parked so as to be close enough to pick up Caruso’s transmissions. His signal was garbled but readable. I-35 ran directly from Dallas to Red Oak, roughly eighteen miles away, which meant Ryan and the rest of The Campus could reach their objective in a relatively short time—as long as the evening traffic didn’t snarl. But the same held true for Special Agent Callahan and her task force. It would take a few minutes for the raid team to hit the head and gear up. Judging from the tone of her voice, this lady didn’t seem like the kind to mess around. She wouldn’t be far behind.
“You gonna try and get there sometime today or what, Jack?” Ding asked from the passenger seat.
Ryan accelerated south on the freeway. Traffic was heavy but moving, and going close to the speed limit.
Midas spoke next. He was behind the wheel in the car with Clark now, and his impatience at the traffic was evident in his voice. “They’ll be able to use lights and sirens to get through this shit. Caruso sure as hell better stall.”
Adara defended her boyfriend. “Dom will do what he can,” she said. “He’ll definitely let us know when they’re on the road.”
Ryan sped past a highway patrolman doing ninety. Mercifully, the trooper had already pulled over another vehicle.
It was dark and beginning to sprinkle by the time Ryan took the exit to Farm Road 644. Midweek traffic was light on the farm-to-market road, even at rush hour, and he poured on the speed, feeling the Avenger’s engine open up with a throaty roar. He’d been nearest to the interstate when Dom gave the address, so he felt certain Midas’s and Adara’s vehicles were somewhere behind him.
“Watch these wet roads, ’mano,” Chavez said as Ryan drifted around a corner, a mile away from their target residence now, according to the GPS on his phone.
“Nag, nag, nag,” Ryan said, and punched the gas.
Chavez flipped him off and hung on to the side handle.
A minute later Ryan slowed, driving past a white frame house set back off the road about five hundred feet. Barbed-wire fencing, meant to keep in cattle, ran in front of the property and a heavy gate made of rusted drilling pipe blocked the entry. The porch light was visible through the trees. Ryan took the first left past the target address. He was surprised to find Clark’s pickup truck already parked in the tall Johnson grass along the gravel road. He and Midas were nowhere to be seen.
“How the hell did you get here first?” Ryan said into his mic.
“Superior navigation, kid,” Clark said.
“Position?” Ryan asked.
“You guys are late,” Midas said. “We’re already moving up to the house.”
Clark suddenly gasped over the radio, whispering, “Midas, get up here. Everyone else stand by.”
• • •
John Clark had seen great evil in his life. He was no stranger to misery. He’d experienced unspeakable sadness and unbearable pain—in Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and hot spots around the world—but the worst of it, the incident that gutted him, had happened right here in the good old USA. Admiral James Greer had known the whole story, but he’d taken the secrets with him when he passed away. Sandy knew most of it, and she’d probably guessed the rest, though they never talked about it. Clark was able to suppress the memories for the most part—Pam Madden’s brutal murder and the vengeance he’d meted out against the pimps and drug dealers who’d done it. He dreamed of her sometimes still, not in a longing way as someone might pine for a lost love, but because he was so incredibly sorry that he’d not been there to save her. He was a former SEAL when they’d met, already entrenched in the ways of warfare and mayhem, but it was Pam’s death that pushed him into the instrument that he’d become. Knowing her, watching her turn her life around, and then seeing that life snuffed out, had changed him forever—and left a mark on his soul that could not be erased.
His hands shook with pent-up rage when he peered through the window into Naldo Cantu’s house and saw the girls. There were three of them curled into fetal positions and chained by their ankles to filthy mattresses on metal army cots. Two wore short baby-doll nightgowns; another wore nothing but a gray T-shirt and bore obvious track marks. She’d been there awhile. All three of the girls had ugly burns on their arms and legs. An overturned garbage can beside one of the cots revealed several used condoms, some syringes, and a wad of candy wrappers—probably all the girls had had to eat. He could make out two Hispanic men lounging on the couch in the adjacent room watching television and drinking beer. He didn’t have a view of the entire room, so there was a possibility of more men inside.
Memories of Pamela Madden and the men Clark had killed coursed through his veins. He fought the urge t
o rush in and shoot these men in the face. He didn’t care how many there were.
Caruso’s voice in his ear startled him—not an easy thing to do to John Clark.
“I’m not very familiar with Dallas. Any guess on our ETA?”
Callahan gave a muffled response that Clark couldn’t hear. There was the sound of car doors slamming, then Dom said, “I hear you . . . traffic like this we’ll be lucky to get there in twenty-five.”
Clark nodded at this new information. The girls would be safe soon enough, but he wanted to get his pound of flesh. Prison was too cushy for men like these. Clark backed away from the window and into the live oaks that surrounded the house. Midas met him there.
“How do you want to do this?” the former Delta soldier asked. “Drag them out and beat the hell out of them until they talk . . . then beat them some more after they talk?”
“You got a look inside?”
Midas gave a somber nod. “Through the living room window,” he said. “I counted three males, two on the couch, one in a recliner. Two handguns on the coffee table, but no long guns that I saw. I could only see one female through the open door from my vantage point, but she looked in pretty bad shape.”
“She is,” Clark said. “I counted three girls. Not sure about the other rooms.” He shook his head to clear it, willing himself to calm down and think. Rage would only blind him. In situations like this, he needed to be calculating and calm. He didn’t completely rule out killing an enemy inside the United States, but he’d try to avoid it if possible. These men had crucial intelligence. If he had to wait and let Caruso get it, then—
The sound of a screen door slamming pulled him out of his thoughts. There was laughter, and then someone said, “Cerveza . . .”
Gravel crunched. A car door slammed.
Midas smiled in the darkness. “Somebody’s going on a beer run!”
Clark spoke in a hoarse whisper, giving orders as he moved back toward the fence. “Jack, move to the east end of the road. Adara, you set up to the west.” Clark checked his watch. “Whichever way this guy turns, let him get down the road far enough they can’t see him from the house, then box him in. Cautious but quick. Keep in mind, we have about eighteen minutes to do what we need to do before we have to exfil.”
