Stalking Moon
Page 22
"Yes," I said. "That's what I don't know."
"Water. Specifically, the water man."
"Xochitl, well, the woman who called herself Xochitl, she told me to watch out for the water man. I realized later that could be taken several different ways."
"And made more difficult by her imprecise English. Well. Water. We're actually talking about water trucks. Tank trucks."
"I saw some of them. In Nogales. The men who bring water up into the slum areas. Is that what you mean?"
"Not quite. As you probably know, Mexico has a bad problem with polluted water. Nogales, Juarez, the border towns, the problem is even more severe because of the less worthy maquiladoras. So some maquiladoras, the ones with enough money and good reputations, they bring in water from the US. In Nogales, there are several maquiladoras that regularly send tank trucks into Arizona."
"Wait, wait. I'm having trouble following this. Can you go back to why Mari went on all those horseback rides, looking for water in the San Rafael Valley?"
"Of course. But let me jump sideways here." He laughed. "I can't really jump, but I still like the memory of jumping. So. Bobby Guinness. I think Mari told you that we were cutting back on the number of jobs we took on. Her reputation was world famous, well, Bobby Guinness was world famous. But two things happened. Two problems. Her cancer, of course. We decided to scale back, work only with you. Did you know that I'm also a hacker, that I pretty much do the same things you do?"
"I guessed that."
"Don't need much sleep, since I doze in my chair between computer tasks. So I've been working pretty much inside this big circle. More like two horseshoe-shaped desks with an aisle on each side large enough for my chair. I've got a dozen workstations, but then, I don't need to tell you how I worked."
"I'd like to see your setup."
"When I'm set up again, you will."
"Again?"
"I've had to move my operational base. I told you we had two problems. The second thing that happened to us was that after we took on this job of finding the embezzled Mexican money, we started getting all kinds of probes directed at our computers. I had enough cutouts, firewalls, that kind of thing. Nobody got within three jumps of my computers. But they were clumsier, and I could trace most of the attacks to Chechnya. Then we heard about the new, increased trafficking in women into Mexico and on to the US. When we agreed to take on that job, trying to find who ran the smuggling cartel, the probes increased. Not just in number, but in sophistication. One probe got just a jump away from me. I knew it was only a matter of time."
A nurse came in to adjust the morphine drip.
"Can I bring you anything to eat?" she said.
"I've never been in a hospital where they gave you food," I said.
"We're different. Most hospitals figure that only the patients need special care. We know that family and friends suffer in their own way. Food? Something to drink?"
"How about a beer?" Don asked.
"I'll see what's in the fridge. And you, miss?"
"Some Vicodin," I said with a laugh, but she took me seriously.
"Are you in pain?"
"Actually, yes. I fell off a horse a while back, really screwed up my shoulder."
"I'll have the doctor write you a scrip, I'll make sure it gets to you. The doctor would like to have a consultation with you, Mr. Guinness, when you're free."
"Ten minutes," Don said. "I'll ring the call button."
When she left, I flipped through the envelopes and opened the one labeled zamora. Don let me glance over the pages.
"Nothing there that rang any of my bells. What were you looking for?"
"Can't say."
"How about this one?"
He nudged the medina folder.
"Not yet. You need to wrap things up for me. I see three separate threads here, I don't yet see how they connect."
"Four threads, actually. Smuggling. Water. Money. Basta Ya."
"How are they connected?"
"I don't know, Laura. Do you?"
"Not entirely."
"Okay. Two last things you should know. Water. Zamora's maquiladora is one of the Nogales corporations that sends tank trucks into Arizona for water. He has five trucks. I did some sophisticated math. Gallons of water, number of workers. One truck a day would take care of all needs inside his maquiladora. Including worker's showers."
"So? Five trucks, a different truck goes up every day."
"By hacking into the US Customs database, I found out that as many as three trucks a day come across at the Nogales border station. The database also shows the time they go back into Mexico, so I can make a rough calculation of how long they're in the US. Average time, sixteen to twenty hours. My guess? The trucks are smuggling women. If I had the time, I'd access whatever computers stored digital satellite information, mapping the most popular smuggling routes of the coyotes. My guess? We'd see a lot of those trucks up into the ranching areas of the San Rafael Valley. Wait, wait, hold that question, I may have the answer. I'm having somebody do a search right now of ownership of all ranches. I want to find out how many have been purchased over the past two years by some front organization that I can trace to Zamora."
"God, you're a busy boy, Don."
"Don't you love it?"
"What's the other thing you want to tell me?"
"Basta Ya and Luna. What did you find out?"
"I know my ex-husband was heavily financed to get women authentic identity kits and then help them relocate in the US."
"Exactly."
"He was only the conduit. He never knew who provided the money."
"Mari is Luna. Luna is Mari."
We both looked at her. She was still unconscious.
"But there are so many people involved."
"At least twenty in different cities, helping the women get settled. But it was all Mari's idea. Her money, her connections."
"So I was talking to her. In the chat room."
"She was doing that when I first got here. Amazing that she had the strength to focus on operating that Palm Pilot. There's one thing more."
He took a thick list from his briefcase. Page after page of names, some with addresses or other information, most of them blank.
"Do you recognize these?"
I ran my finger down several pages, finally stopped and shook my head.
"It's all the names in those underground bunkers. The names from the videotape that Alex shot. That's why Man was up in that area on that day you rode with her. She'd gotten something from Xochitl. I don't know what, but she'd told Mari to look at that specific ranch."
"Jesus Christ. I can't deal with all of this."
"I'm sorry. We didn't think for a moment that you'd get so ... so involved. Your arrest was a major surprise. Mari was heartsick."
A doctor appeared in the doorway. She looked at Mari, looked at the computer monitors, and flipped quickly through her charts.
"Mr. Guinness. I'm Dr. Nancy Miller. Could we have a talk?"
"Sure. Dr. Miller, this is Man's sister, Laura."
"Laura. Please, you're welcome to join us. Can we talk in my office? Do you need help with your wheelchair?"
"Can you please give us another ten minutes?" I said.
"We need to talk now."
My cell phone rang.
"Mom?" Alex said.
"No. It's Laura. But I'm in her room. Let me see if she can talk."
Mari's eyes flickered open. She looked vaguely around the room until she fixed on the cell phone in my hand. She tried to reach for it.
"Hold on, Alex."
I put the phone to Mari's ear, intending to hold it there. But she slowly maneuvered her hand to the phone.
"Leave me with Alex," she said.
Don wheeled his chair to the doorway, and the three of us left. As the door swooshed shut behind us, I looked through the window and saw Mari smiling.
"It's her daughter," I said. "She's on her way here."
"How long will it tak
e?" Dr. Miller asked, her lips a tight line—not a good sign, not at all what I wanted to see.
"She's in Mexico. She's just leaving. She'll be here in four hours."
"I'm really sorry, Laura. Your sister probably won't live another ten minutes."
"We've got to be inside," Don said, about to ram the door open with his chair.
"No."
I held back his chair.
"Let go, Goddamnit! Let me in there. I want to be with her."
I put my hands on his shoulders, knelt, leaned against him, put my head against his neck, and hugged him.
"She's saying goodbye to Alex."
The three of us watched through the glass, Don pressing against the chair's armrests to raise his body high enough. Mari's lips moved slowly, deliberately, her chest rising and falling every so slightly as she tried to keep enough oxygen in her lungs to propel yet another word, yet one more.
Finally, I couldn't bear to watch her face and turned to the heart rate and blood pressure monitor. Her vital signs ebbed and flowed, falling off.
"I love you," Don said, his lips pressed against the glass as we saw Mari make an extraordinary effort to say the same words into the cell phone. Her head settled into the pillow, the hand with the cell phone relaxed away from her ear, and she died.
Dr. Miller pushed the door open, and I picked up the cell phone.
"Alex," I said, but she wouldn't stop screaming. "Alex. She's gone."
34
I drove Don to Tucson, arranged a room for him at Lodge on the Desert, and set about unpacking his aluminum work cases. In an hour we had all three of his laptops connected through Qualcomm SatPhones into the Globalstar Stratos network.
"You know what I want?" I asked him.
"Gonna take a while. But when you called last night, I started crunching the financial data. I used the IRS databases, some from the Justice Department, other stuff that I've collected on my own. Here's where we are so far."
He handed me a list of fifteen countries, eleven of which were printed in a purple font, one in yellow, and the other three in red.
"Purple means they're clear. Yellow means not likely, but the data's not all in. Red means I've found at least one of your names, and the computers are looking for more names, plus getting me details of the accounts in the one name identified."
I'd faxed him a copy of the newspaper photo of the groundbreaking at Zamora's maquiladora. He spread it on top of one of the laptop keyboards.
"Major financial players. Zamora and Garza."
"Medina?"
"Nothing yet. As expected, nothing for Xochitl, whose real name, by the way, is Svetlana Peshkova. From a small village in the Caucasus, with known ties to Chechnya rebels, according to Russian Intel files."
"I thought she was Albanian."
"Laura, there's a lot of people here using fake IDs."
"Kinda like you and me," I said.
"Right. Okay. These other two people in the newspaper photo were harder to identity. I had to scan their faces, digitally enhance them, then run them through the face identification software and compare them to officials in the Zedillo government. This one's name is Carlos Ibarra. Ministry of Tourism. This other one is more interesting. Luis Ocampo. He was once in the Public Ministry, which operates under the Office of the Attorney General. Medina's inner circle. Ocampo was bounced when Fox got elected and appointed a new public security chief. Alejandro Gertz Manero. Manero cleaned house with a vengeance."
"I don't really want all this detail."
"Okay. Let's switch to the offshore bank accounts. Here's a summary of money trails for Ocampo, Zamora, and Garza, who, by the way, was once a major player in the Mexican drag cartel headed by El Chapo. Real name, Joaquin Guzman, who made major headlines a year ago when he bought his way out of Puente Grande prison. Toughest in all of Mexico."
"Don, way too many details I'm not interested in."
"Believe me, you want to know about El Chapo. Along with some of his top lieutenants, he's wanted by the US feds. Warrants have been issued. If El Chapo or any of his guys are found and arrested, they could be extradited across the border. Guess who's in charge of the task force, waiting to process the extradition?"
"Michael Dance."
"Bingo bongo."
He pushed off from the laptop, gliding his chair across the room to a stack of bound documents with red covers.
"I'm assembling all the backup data. You'll get summary printouts. Each folder is for a different country."
"What are we looking at?"
"Well. There's the usual suspects of offshore secret banking accounts. Bahamas, Caymans, Panama, a lot of little Caribbean islands that have tighter morals and are really not worth looking at. Then there's Lebanon, Israel, Russia, and Liechtenstein. But I struck gold when I started looking at banks on Niue and other Pacific Island accounts. Major tax havens. But last year the US government declared sanctions against transfers of money to Niue."
"Please, Don. Skip the lectures, okay? I don't have time."
"You'll never succeed in a government job."
"Thank God for that," I said.
"But you need to know this much. There's an agency called the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering. FATE It's an inter-governmental group, develops and promotes policies to defeat money laundering schemes. Not just in the US, but internationally. As far as we're concerned, FATF is the group that sets up money laundering counter-measures in non-member countries. So. Niue. This dinky island money laundering paradise. Nobody can move money in, and it's getting increasingly difficult to move money out. So that's what I looked at. Not what might have gone in, but what's going out."
"And that's how you came up with this list of players?"
"Yup, But..."
"You've got one hell of a lot of buts today, Don."
"One last thing. A lot of Mexicans working in the US send money home to their families. Conservative estimate, six billion a year. One of my sidelines in this office is to see if any of the drug cartels are trying to expand into this money transfer business. Take it over, take a percentage, whatever. So when I cross-reference every bit of financial stuff I've got here from all these sources, this name wins the lottery."
"Garza."
"I'd guess that he's really Zamora's man."
"But that doesn't mean that Zamora is involved."
"Doesn't mean he isn't. Mexican drug cartels have many layers of cutouts to protect the top players."
"But no direct connection to Zamora?"
"No."
"Medina?" I asked.
"No."
"And Michael Dance? How does he fit into this nasty business?"
"You'll have to ask him yourself."
"Why me?"
"He's powerful, Laura."
"What about Jake Nasso? Taá Wheatley?"
"Just haven't had time to get to them. I thought the Mexicans were most important, so I ran all their data first."
"Well, I'm going to have to talk to Dance."
"You're going to brace an Assistant US Attorney?"
"Today," I said. "You just keep working on the rest of the financial data."
"When are you meeting him?"
"His birthday party. Tonight, at his house down in Tubac."
"Seeing as how you escaped from his custody, I don't think a birthday present would be appropriate."
"I'm bringing him a big cake," I said. "He just won't like what pops out of it."
"Well, it's going to rain down there. Don't get wet."
Don't get wet, I thought. Don't get water. Don't get the water man.
"Trucks," I said excitedly. "Godammit, how could I be so stupid."
"What are you talking about?"
"Can you hack into the Border Patrol's satellite imaging programs?"
"I can arrange it. What do you need?"
I told him, he made three phone calls, and we waited until one of the laptops pinged. He made another phone call and held the cell phone out to
me.
"Tell him what you want."
"The Nogales border crossing," I said.
Nobody answered, but I watched images flicking across the laptop screen.
"Not the main crossing," I said. "Switch to the newer one, where the trucks go."
A high shot appeared on the laptop covering an area of at least fifty square miles.
"Tighten in," I said. "North of the truck crossing, tighter, tighter ... there. Just leave that up for a while. And thanks, whoever you are."
"Laura, what am I looking at?" Don said.
"Trucks. Hundreds of trucks."
"So?"
"There's a new border agreement for long-haul truckers. Cruzadores, they're called. Crossers. Before the US signed this agreement, the Mexican cruzadores had to park their rigs in these lots and wait to transfer the goods to another truck. Now they just stay there a few hours until all their paperwork is checked. They can take the cargo directly to US cities. It's all sealed electronically, so the trucks can pass with a minimum of hassle by US Customs."
"I don't get it."
"Most of these trucks are bringing goods out of Mexico. But one of the things they need desperately in Nogales is good water. So some of these trucks are certified as empty when they cross north to pick up cargos of bottled water."
"And even the empty trucks are electronically sealed?" Don said excitedly.
"Right."
"But they're not? What are they bringing in? Narcotics?"
"In a diesel semi-trailer? Nobody would take a chance loading something that big with narcotics. No. They're smuggling people."
"Human cargo."
"Women."
"Somebody's paid money," Don said, already working at another laptop. "Bribes to tamper with the process of electronic sealing."
"The women are put inside, then the truck is sealed. US Customs must have a database of all cruzadores that have the necessary papers. All the trucks, with license plates, plus all the international paperwork."
"I'm on it," Don said.
"How long will it take?"
"In one sense, not long. It's just a matter of money. Like the satellite images. Once I find a hacker who has up-to-date copies of the Customs database, I can get listings of whatever trucks you want. But that's the easy part. What trucking company? What dates? If you don't give me some specific filters, I could be crunching that database forever without knowing what I was looking at."