Jules’s body ignited with alarm.
She bolted forward again as the black-and-white screeched to a halt. Two SDPD cops jumped out and went to take up positions behind their car, but the driver was hit and dropped to the ground before he could make it. Without coming to full halt, Jules took aim at the hostile who had taken down the cop, but there were civilians all around the lot and she couldn’t fire. She had to keep going. The hostile heading for Tess was still rushing down the side of the lot, closing fast on the parked SUV.
Jules looked right and left. There was no way she was going to get to Tess first. Not without running straight into to the hostile’s path.
The hostile was now beelining for the car—he seemed to know Tess and Alex were in it, possibly because Tess wasn’t in a parking spot but waiting by the exit. As their trajectories converged on the Explorer, Jules saw him train his gun on it—but she couldn’t shoot at him, not with all the people and parked cars between them.
Instead, she veered right and leapt up onto the hood of a parked car, climbing quickly onto its roof, where she could get a clearer shot at the man. She lined him up, gripping her gun with both hands, about to pull the trigger when shots cut the air past her from the right, from the shooter farther back. A round grazed her shoulder, throwing her off balance, and she fell off the roof and hit the asphalt hard, her gun skittering out of her fingers.
The shooter she’d tried to take out was now barely twenty yards away from her and charging in for the kill.
Jules was on her hands and knees, looking for her gun, eyes darting from under the cars and back to catch glimpses of the killer closing in, seeing a wicked grin creep over his face as he anticipated the kill—then she heard a wild screech from behind her and turned to see the Explorer lurching backward, wheels spinning, coming right at her.
She rolled out of its way as it drew level with her, its tires squealing as it slewed to a stop.
She didn’t need an embossed invitation.
She pulled the back door open and leapt inside.
“Go!” she yelled.
Tess threw the car into gear and floored the gas, and as they blew out of the exit, Jules caught a glimpse of the receding gunman who was already pulling back and disappearing into the crowd.
As Tess swung onto Park Boulevard and pulled away from the park, Jules knew the area would soon be crawling with cops. They’d deal with the shooters. Still, she wasn’t sure she’d made the right call. She closed her eyes and tried to calm herself as she wondered about it.
Either way, Alex and Tess were safe.
That had to count for something.
45
I could breathe again.
Tess and Alex were now out of harm’s way, tucked away in a bureau safe house that Jules had driven them to, straight from Balboa Park and bypassing the hotel. Villaverde had sent a couple of agents to the hotel to pack up their stuff and take it over; one of them would stay with them to beef up security. I promised Tess I’d be there as soon as I could. Until then, I was in Villaverde’s office with him and Munro, chewing over what Pennebaker’s little news flash meant.
“It’s got to be someone who was close to Navarro,” Munro speculated. “Someone who knew what he was working on and is now trying to get his hands on it, one of his lieutenants who climbed up the ranks after he was killed.”
That’s how it works down there. Every time some kingpin is arrested or killed, you get a bunch of his underlings going to war with each other over who’s going to take his place, all while trying to fend off takeover attempts from other cartels. The violence spirals and is often far worse than it was before the takedown. It’s like we can’t win either way.
We weren’t going to get anything out of his shooters. The one Jules had knifed was DOA before he reached the hospital. The other two had melted away into the crowd and disappeared.
Villaverde asked, “What is this drug anyway? What was so special about it?”
“We don’t know,” Munro told him. “All we know is that it’s a very powerful hallucinogen that McKinnon found through some godforsaken tribe in the middle of nowhere.”
I remembered the recording I’d heard of McKinnon’s distress call. It had come in unexpectedly, via a cell phone that had been smuggled in to him.
His message was brief, chaotic, and intense.
He gave his name and said he’d been kidnapped several months earlier by armed bandits while bioprospecting in the rainforests down in the south, near Chiapas. The banditos had thought to ransom him to whatever big pharmaceutical company he was working for—a common occupational hazard for researchers working in the hinterlands in that part of the world. When it turned out McKinnon wasn’t working for anyone but himself, they debated killing him before coming up with another way to monetize their catch. They offered him to Navarro, figuring El Brujo would be interested in the kidnapped chemist’s talents.
They had no idea.
In a desperate attempt to stay alive by proving his usefulness, McKinnon made the mistake of telling Navarro about something he’d discovered, something he’d been searching for for years, something the shaman of a small, isolated tribe living deep in the rainforest had shared with him: a radical hallucinogen that was, according to him, unlike anything else out there. Navarro tried it, loved it, and became obsessed with it.
“McKinnon was very cagey about giving us any specifics,” Munro told Villaverde. “It was like pulling teeth. He said it was an alkaloid that would be irresistibly popular, and described it as ‘ayahuasca on steroids.’ But Navarro had a problem. With most of these tribal hallucinogens, like ayahuasca—taking them is like drinking mud. Literally. Thick horrible sludge that tastes like shit and makes you puke your guts out for days. No one would want to try that. Navarro needed McKinnon to turn his discovery into an easy-to-pop pill that didn’t have the horrible side effects—and once it was a pill, Navarro could easily add chemicals into the mix to make it highly addictive. He threatened McKinnon with a slow, drawn-out death—we know how convincing he can be on that front. So McKinnon got to work. And he did it. He told us he figured out how to synthesize it into pill form, but he hadn’t told Navarro—not yet. He wasn’t sure how long he could hold out. We looked into McKinnon and he checked out. He had the profile and all the know-how he needed to come up with something like that. So we had to do something. We couldn’t afford to let that drug hit the streets. That’s why we had to get him out.”
Or kill him, I thought.
“But you don’t know what its effects are?” Villaverde pressed.
“McKinnon wouldn’t say. I guess he thought it was too damn dangerous to say more. That’s why he called in his SOS. And that’s why he didn’t leave any record of it behind. At least, nothing we’ve found.”
Villaverde nodded, soaking it in. “So now we’ve got another player after it, whoever hired the bikers.” He turned to me. “Why you? What do they think you can give them?”
I said, “I have no idea. But they must know I was there”—I turned to Munro—“we were there, and maybe they think I found McKinnon’s notes and still have them.” I looked at Munro, curious about something. “You were there, too. Why is this about me and not you?”
He gave me a nonchalant shrug. “No fucking clue.”
Bottom line was, we needed to know who we were dealing with if Tess and Alex—and maybe I—weren’t going to spend the rest of our days boxed up in some kind of witness protection wonderland. And something was bothering me about that very question.
I turned back to Munro.
“What do you know about Navarro’s death?”
From the knowing half-grin on his face, it was clear he knew exactly where I was going with this.
“I can’t tell you for a fact that the bastard’s dead, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I felt a little charge go off inside me. “It is.”
Again with the shrug. “We went after him, as you know. DEA doesn’t take an attack on any of its a
gents lightly, least of all some coked-up maricón coming after someone like Hank Corliss.”
Any narco, Navarro included, had to be well aware of that. It was gospel, ever since Enrique Camarena was yanked out of his car and tortured to death in Mexico in the mid-eighties. The DEA had pulled no punches in bringing his killers to justice, even going so far as to kidnap suspects that were proving hard to extradite and smuggling them into the United States to face trial. And yet, Navarro had come after Corliss himself, brazenly and in plain sight.
A bad move.
A mad move, even.
“The narcos beat us to it,” Munro continued. “Navarro had brought down so much heat on them all that they decided it was in their best interest to end the witch hunt themselves. But they weren’t about to hand him over to us alive, not with everything he knew. So they invited him in for a chitchat. He wasn’t buying.”
“So they took him out with a car bomb,” I threw in. I remembered going over an interdepartmental report on that. “How solid was the coroner’s paperwork?”
“Come on. You know what we’re dealing with here. Mexico.” He pronounced it may-hee-koh, the sarcasm loud and clear. “But we did what we could. We had our own guys run DNA tests and ask the right questions. And their take was, it was him.”
“But you were basing that on, what?”
“Whatever we could get our hands on. Stuff we found at his house—his toothbrush, hair, spunk on his sheets. General height, weight.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Yes, on two fronts. They matched ones we found at his house. And they matched a file the federales had on him, one that had prints from an arrest early in his career.”
None of that was foolproof. If he had enough money and the right connections on whom to spend it—which someone in his position had to have—Navarro could have staged the whole thing.
Which is where my suspicions was converging.
There was no way of knowing for sure. Not yet, anyway.
Either way, it didn’t really matter. Whether it was Navarro or one of his ex-lieutenants, what mattered was that one of them was after something they thought I had. Because of a mistake, an error of judgment I made—a crime I committed, let’s not mince words here—five years ago. What goes around comes around, right? I’d heard that piece of twaddle all my life. I never gave it much thought—until now. But if that was the case, if my take on this was correct, it meant the bad guys’ game plan was to get hold of me. It meant I was their golden goose.
And that was something I could definitely use.
46
The safe house was a three-bedroom ranch-style house close to the top of the hill in El Cerrito. It was pretty much what I expected. Someone with a more generous predisposition might use the terms minimalist, vintage, or functional to describe it. I’m thinking it came out of the gulag section at Home Depot. I wasn’t exactly expecting Four Seasons–level comfort, but I felt bad for Tess and Alex, more so since I didn’t know how long we’d need to keep them holed up here. The place was just grim.
Still, its living room faced west and afforded a pretty decent view of the city’s skyline and the ocean beyond, especially now, with the sun melting into the horizon. Tenants who weren’t here for the reasons we were would probably find it inspiring or uplifting. I didn’t. I was just standing there, alone, somberly taking in the passing of another day, thinking about Mexico, about Michelle, and about how pulling that trigger had somehow created some kind of cosmic ripple that, five years later, had sent a similar bullet ripping into her.
“Nice view.”
Tess sidled up next to me, looking out, her hand brushing up against my back before snaking around my waist.
“Only the best is good enough for my gal, you know that.”
She smirked. “You spoil me, kind sir.”
I glanced back toward the bedrooms. I could hear Jules and the new guy, Cal Matsuoka, chatting quietly in the kitchen.
“How’s Alex?”
“Not great. He’s still shaken up about what happened,” she told me, her tone dejected. “Moving here wasn’t great for him either.” She cast her eyes across the room. “I don’t know what to tell him anymore.”
I nodded. “We’ll figure some way out of this.”
She shrugged and looked out, her eyes lackluster and failing to mask the frustration and unease that were engulfing her.
“What happens after you get these guys—the ones who got the bikers and the deputy? What happens then? How do we know whoever sent them won’t just send others after us?” She turned to face me, and she really looked spooked. “How do we know it’s ever going to end?”
This was the moment to look squarely into her eyes and say something heroically reassuring and supremely confident like, Don’t worry, we’ll get them. But Tess knew me better than that, and she knew the world didn’t really work like that. The thing is, standing there beside her, I couldn’t imagine not getting these guys. I was going to see to it that they were out of our lives for good. So I actually did say, “We’ll get them. Them, and whoever’s behind them.” And to her credit, she didn’t scoff or even show any hint of doubting it. She just nodded, and her face tightened up with resolve.
She looked out at the sunset again.
“Tell me what happened,” she said. “The guy you shot. The scientist. Tell me about it.”
I’d given her a quick summary of the Eagles’ ties to Navarro and—in broad, intentionally vague strokes—told her how it all linked back to the mission in Mexico. I’d never told her about it, just like I hadn’t told Michelle at the time. And this time around, I hadn’t gone into detail because I didn’t want her to know the whole story.
“Talk to me, Sean,” she pressed, reading my hesitation. “Tell me what happened.”
And something shifted inside me, and I decided I didn’t want to make the same mistake I’d made with Michelle. I should have told her, just like I should have told Tess about this, too, ages ago.
I looked out, the sun no more than a golden sliver getting swallowed up by a ravenous sea, and I could still see those events unfurling in my mind’s eye, like it was yesterday, although you never know, do you? The mind plays tricks. I’ve found that some memories people remember so vividly, the ones we’re sure we know so precisely, are sometimes not as accurate as we think. Over time, the mind massages the truth. It distorts and adjusts and adds in small increments, making it hard to tell what actually happened from what didn’t. But in this case, I think my memory was razor sharp.
I’d have been happier if it wasn’t.
It wasn’t easy to get to him.
Navarro’s lab was in the middle of nowhere, high up in the lawless and impenetrable Sierra Madre Occidental, a volcanic range of tall mountains that were cleaved by steep gorges, ravines, and plunging canyons known as barrancas, some of which were deeper than the Grand Canyon. Neither the Aztec emperors nor the Spanish conquistadors had ever been able to impose their authority on the violent and fiercely independent villagers who lived in the Sierra’s folds, and the Mexican government hadn’t fared any better. The mountains, rife with marijuana and poppy fields, were controlled by regional strongmen and warring drug mafias. Gangs of armed bandits and renegades still roamed around the wild hinterland on horses and mules, like they did a hundred years ago and more. Navarro had chosen his compound’s location well.
We didn’t have that much to go on. McKinnon’s position had been pinpointed by homing in on the signal of the cell phone during his call. After that, the mission had been planned hastily, and in the interest of not alerting any bought-and-paid-for Mexican law enforcement personnel in Navarro’s pay, we put together the intel we needed ourselves using one of the Air Force’s Predator drones, without involving the local authorities.
The plan was for us to be choppered in, but the landscape around our target wasn’t doing us any favors. The compound sat on a high mesa, and the terrain around it was too hostile and inhospitable for a ground infiltr
ation. Given its high altitude setting and its commanding allaround views, chopper approaches were also highly vulnerable to detection. The best we could do was land about three miles away and cover the rest of the journey on foot over rough terrain that, we knew, was home to scorpions, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, bears, and weird, mythical mutant cougar-like beasts called onzas to boot.
A cakewalk.
We hit the ground about three hours before sunrise, figuring that would give us enough time to get to the compound under cover of dark - ness, get McKinnon out, and make it back to the chopper by dawn. We moved fast and sleek across steep, rocky slopes and rushing creeks, through pine forests and thickets of oak saplings, juniper, and cactus. There were eight of us in the strike team: me, Munro, a couple of DEA combat troops, and four Special Forces soldiers. We knew we were venturing into a well-guarded compound, so we were armed to the teeth: Heckler and Koch UMPs with sound suppressors, silenced Glocks, Bowie knives, body armor, night vision goggles. We were also wearing head-mounted video minicams that were sending a live feed back to the DEA’s field office inside the embassy in Mexico City, and we had a Predator flying overhead, giving us real-time visuals via the drone’s operators at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. The plan, obviously, was not to engage. We were meant to sneak in and get our man out before they knew we were even there.
Didn’t happen.
Munro and I made it through the sleepy security without too much trouble. There was only one guard we couldn’t get around stealthily, and Munro had used his knife to put him down. We found McKinnon where he said he’d be, in his lab. He looked like he was in his late fifties and was of average height, a bit on the skinny side, with a silvery goatee and clear blue eyes that were shot through with intelligence. He was wearing a white straw cowboy hat with a silver scorpion clipped onto it and a snapbutton Western shirt, and he had a battered old leather satchel on the counter beside him. He seemed scared and thrilled in equal parts to see us there, and was all raring to go. But there was a wrinkle.
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