He dropped his car at his place and they rode downtown together in her Mazda sport sedan. During the ride, she asked about his personal life.
“I don’t want to pry,” she said, “but you looked unhappy about Paris. We’re friends, Valentine. You can talk to me if it helps.”
He stared at the ornate facades of Embassy Row. He wondered if this line of questioning figured in her assessment of him for a job that was urgent, hush-hush, and involved working directly for her.
“Basically,” he said, “long-distance relationships suck.”
“I see.” She glanced at him through her sunglasses.
“Look, I grew up in one place. You know that. Same neighborhood, same house. From Chicago straight to the Patrol. Culture shock. Craziness. Then I moved from the border to Buenos Aires. I barely got settled. Now I’m here. Meanwhile, Fatima’s from Paris, she’s French, and that’s the bottom line.”
“She wants you to go live with her?”
“No. And I wouldn’t expect her to move here.”
“There’s no real solution. That’s why you’re depressed.”
He grimaced. “Tell you the truth, turns out another guy is in the picture.”
“Oh, I get it. Típica francesada.”
The tone of “typical French situation” spurred him to Fatima’s defense.
He told Isabel what Fatima had told him days ago. She had met Karim when they were nineteen-year-olds in the housing project—a brief but intense romance. Karim joined the French army and became a commando. Fatima became a cop. She hadn’t heard from him again until he transferred to a tactical unit of her counterterror agency and they ran into each other one day after almost twenty years.
“Did you break up?”
“Not yet.”
“What does she want?”
“She doesn’t know. She needs to think. I told her, ‘Listen, I’m not comfortable with this whole Jules and Jim situation.’”
Isabel pulled into the garage of her headquarters near the National Mall. She showed the guard her ID, then turned with a sardonic look.
“Who and Jim?”
“It’s a French movie.”
“This relationship sure has expanded your horizons.”
A big quiet building in the big quiet of a downtown Saturday. Their footsteps echoed on marble in the lobby. Recognizing Isabel as a boss, a duo of drowsy security guards roused themselves in a hurry. They waved Isabel and Pescatore through the metal detector with a cursory glance at Pescatore’s ID. In a reception area on the tenth floor, a more alert guard at a desk relieved Pescatore of his cell phone and put it in a small locker.
Isabel briefed him in her corner office. Plaques. A Miami Heat poster. Souvenirs from foreign law enforcement agencies. Family photos: nieces and nephews in baptismal and communion finery, men in U.S. military uniforms. Work photos: Isabel with agents in raid jackets. Isabel shaking hands with a cabinet secretary.
Pescatore had a stomach full of meat, a head full of Malbec. The espresso had barely dented his jet lag. He wanted nothing more or less than a nap. But he kept his eyes on the image freeze-framed on the screen of the desktop computer.
“San Diego Border Patrol Sector,” she said. “A few miles from the Line.”
“Looks familiar.”
“A smuggling corridor. It’s calmed down since our day. The whole border has. But they still move OTMs and SIAs now and then.”
The grainy black-and-white image had been filmed from above by a security camera. A twenty-four-hour convenience store occupied the top of the screen. The lone parked vehicle was a white Chevrolet Express cargo van facing the building. The lights of the store were halos in the night.
“So we think the missing CBP inspector was involved,” he said.
“The van drives through his lane at the port of entry half an hour earlier.”
He noted the numerals on the screen: 2:57 a.m.
“This part,” Isabel said, clicking the mouse, “is hard to watch.”
At the bottom of the screen, a Suburban pulled into the lot. Doors opened. The two gunmen wore Stetson hats and long coats. He knew the look: Sinaloan Badass. Some border gunslingers favored trench coats or slickers at night, partly for style, partly to conceal weapons.
The coats billowed around the men like capes. Their movements were smooth, coordinated, almost balletic. One crept up on the passenger side of the van. The other flared left. He padded up to the driver’s window. He aimed—a slow unfurling of the arm. He fired twice.
The shooter yanked open the driver’s door, hauled out his victim, and did a half spin like a disdainful matador. The black-clad corpse tumbled past him onto the concrete, limbs splayed.
The shooter slid behind the wheel of the van. His partner climbed in on the other side. The van sped away. The Suburban followed.
It was 2:58 a.m.
Isabel stopped the video. She looked at Pescatore.
“Damn,” he said.
“There were ten aliens in the back.”
“According to your unconfirmed intel.”
“Correct. These women are already scared. Now their pollero gets his head blown off in front of them.”
“Cold-blooded.”
“That’s what the rip crews are like. Worse than narcos, worse than human smugglers. Pure predators.”
Pescatore looked at the documents on the desk—the cell phone records of Mario Covington, the Customs and Border Protection inspector who had gone missing soon after the shooting. Last seen at a bar in Rosarito Beach.
“I bet this Mario got whacked,” he said. “A dirty inspector deals with smugglers, okay. But an inspector working at the same time with smugglers and a gang that rips off smugglers, setting up the ambush and everything? That’s crazy.”
Along with the video, the phone records and photos from the border ports established a timeline. After starting his overnight shift at the San Ysidro port of entry on August 5, Covington had received calls on his cell phone from a convicted alien smuggler, a U.S. citizen residing in Tijuana. The smuggler was the driver of the van. Each time the driver called Covington en route to the border, the inspector called a burner cell phone in California. He called the burner for the last time just after he waved the van through his lane into San Diego at 2:20 a.m. Cell-tower data put the burner phone in the vicinity of the convenience store when the gunmen killed the driver. An hour later, they took the van back south to Tecate, Mexico, about sixty miles east of the San Diego–Tijuana port of entry.
Grim-faced, Isabel described the events in Tecate. The crime scene was a motel used by smugglers to stash loads of high-priced clients known in law enforcement parlance as “special interest aliens” (SIAs). The “special interest” referred to the fact that they came from Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, or other havens of terrorism. As opposed to OTMs, or “Other Than Mexicans”: Latin Americans from places where mayhem, massacre, and decapitation were driven by business imperatives, not religious ones.
At five thirty a.m., sustained gunfire had been heard from the second floor of the motel. The police discovered the bodies of ten women shot execution-style. They were Somali, Ethiopian, and Eritrean. The ages ranged from early twenties to mid-fifties. Some of the women had not yet been identified. Three Mexicans guarding them had also been killed. The men had records for crimes typical of rip crews: robbery, kidnapping, assault.
“The descriptions of two male victims match the shooters in the video. The Mexican police claim they don’t have any leads. They have frozen us out. They won’t give us access to evidence that could connect the incidents. No U.S. jurisdiction. None of our business.”
“Do we have confirmation that the women were in the van?”
“No. But Covington’s girlfriend knew about his activities. He told her a load vehicle was coming through with migrants from Africa. Big payday. Africans aren’t smuggled at San Ysidro that often. This can’t be a coincidence, not when you factor in the resemblance between the van shooters and the dead guys
at the motel, the phone traffic, the van going to Tecate, Covington disappearing.”
He thought about the workmanlike brutality of the shooting. Hours later, someone more brutal had killed the killers. And the women.
“What are you thinking as far as motive?” he asked. “Retaliation? The rip crew steals the load and the smugglers track ’em down. But they wouldn’t kill their own clients. Africans pay thirty thousand bucks apiece, right?”
“Maybe a third gang hit the motel.”
“This is some complicated, sinister shit,” he said.
Isabel stretched in her executive chair. He caught himself looking at her lush compact body, recalling its contours.
“There are conflicting theories,” she said. “People say it was done to send a message. Or interfere with business. Make a mess on enemy turf.”
Pescatore thought back to the brief news reports he had seen in France about the massacre. His attention had been on his drama with Fatima.
“This must be taking up all your time,” he said. “The FBI’s involved, the inspector general, you name it.”
“That’s right.”
“I gotta ask you: If the Bureau’s working it, and all your troops”—he waved at the empty cubicles and offices beyond the glass—“and your attachés and vetted units in Mexico, what do you need me for?”
“I should clarify,” she said in a fierce tone. “The FBI took over. We were ordered to stand down. Even though it’s our turf. Even though we opened a corruption case on Covington before the incident.”
Another surprise, Pescatore thought. This is getting wilder.
“That’s why I need you,” Isabel continued. “For a discreet, unofficial inquiry into one angle of the case. A specific, focused lead about a missing individual.”
“The inspector?”
“No. A guy who’s a witness or an accomplice, it’s not clear which.”
“You want me to track him down.”
“Exactly. He knows a lot about what happened.”
“Okay.”
“It needs to be confidential. I’m encountering interference.”
“Inside the U.S. government?”
“Yes. People who have been trying to make my life impossible.”
“Really? Who?”
She used both hands to sweep her hair out of her face, tilting her head back, hands lingering behind her neck. “Now is not the time to get into it.”
Her high-powered job came with high-powered hassles. Her agency functioned in a perpetual cross fire from Republicans, Democrats, the news media, foreign governments, pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant activists. Although lately she had been dealing with congressional hearings and political pressure, he hadn’t thought the problems were unusually serious.
“You can’t tell me?”
“I’ll say this: I’m not winning the battle right now.”
His eyes widened. Although she was only five years older than him, her rise had been swift. She was a workaholic, an instinctive leader, good at cultivating allies and deflecting rivals. Now, despite all the personnel and resources at her disposal, she had turned to him. It showed trust. It also showed she had run out of options.
“Isabel.” He patted her hand. “Whatever you need. If you want, I’ll work no charge. Pro Bono Pescatore.”
“That’s not necessary. I’ve got a discretionary budget. Your firm has a proven track record with the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires.”
“But you and me were engaged to be married. How’s that gonna look?”
“I’ll take that chance. I want to get to the bottom of this. It’s not just about my work situation, the politics. Esas pobres mujeres…”
She paused. She rarely spoke Spanish with him, especially about work.
“I want to know who murdered those women,” she said. “And why. There have been worse massacres, higher body counts. But not on my watch.”
Slowly, she pushed a folder across the desk. The moment had the weight of ceremony: the silence, the afternoon shadows, the thick folder with official stamps. She was opening a door into a secret world. Sealing a covenant with him.
The photos from the crime scene were not especially bloody or lurid. Not sadism, just extermination. The scene was a dingy motel room. The women had been lined up and mowed down. Corpses were crumpled on a frayed brown carpet, slumped against walls, sprawled across a bed whose cover was decorated with images of tropical birds.
Pescatore gritted his teeth. He propped his head in his hand as he reviewed the pictures. A multicolored hooded scarf, tribal-looking, evoking faraway lands. A sandal near a childlike foot. A fist gripping prayer beads. A gold hoop earring entwined in braids. The striking and delicate features of the victims reminded him of the East African immigrants who were plentiful in Washington.
He swallowed. Isabel’s eyes glistened.
She’s my client now, he thought. He looked down at the photos. And so are they.
“Sorry to drop this on you,” she said.
“Don’t be. Now I know what kind of animals we’re dealing with.”
“Valentine, you don’t have to take the job.”
He puffed reproachfully, as if blowing the idea away from him.
“Have you thought about reaching out to Leo Méndez?” he asked.
“Of course. But he’s a full-time journalist now. I can’t take the risk.”
“I won’t tell him anything if you don’t want, but if I’m gonna go poking around down there, he could hook me up with some guys I’d like on my side.”
“Who’s that?”
“His musketeers.”
Chapter 2
Méndez had imagined his death many times, many places, many ways.
Méndez was morbid by nature, nationality, and profession. He had survived ambushes and gunfights. He had studied the tactics and semiotics of assassination. His list of enemies was long and ominous.
In nightmares and daydreams, the ever-changing film of his anticipated demise ran on a constant loop. He had been immolated like the Italian judge Falcone in Palermo, explosives erupting through asphalt to hurl cars and bodies heavenward. He had been shot point-blank like the Mexican presidential candidate Colosio in Tijuana, the gunman surging out of a crowd, grabbing his arm, and putting a gun to his head, an instant of human contact heralding obliteration. He had been shredded in a drive-by fusillade—car to car, pickup to car, motorcycle to car—like late Latin American colleagues in journalism and law enforcement. He had been set afire, flayed alive, dismembered, disemboweled, and decapitated like the narco-grunts in the violence-porn YouTube videos that the cartels used for psyops.
The one scenario Méndez had not imagined was that the end would come at a children’s soccer game in La Jolla, California, U.S.A. And that the hit men would wear suits and ties.
An August weekend: warm sun, mild breeze, the park gleaming green. The summer league held its games on Saturdays at eight thirty a.m. Méndez and his wife were night owls. They did not understand why American soccer parents deprived themselves of sleep after a hard workweek.
Demented puritans, Estela declared. You won’t catch me vertical at that beastly hour.
So Estela stayed home with Renata, their three-year-old. Méndez took his son to the games. Although Méndez’s command of the language had improved, his English was still—in the words of the singer Celia Cruz—“not very good-looking.” He was uneasy among the soccer parents. They were loud and cheery; he was quiet and reserved. They wore shorts and sandals; he stuck to his jeans and gym shoes. They drove shiny vans and sport-utility vehicles; he had bought his brown Chevrolet Caprice from a friend in the San Diego Police. Their mansions overlooked canyons; he rented a bungalow in flatlands south of La Jolla. They were investors, executives, lawyers. He was a journalist-turned-advocate-turned-cop-turned-journalist: a refugee, dangerous and endangered, from the fog of war at the border.
He gravitated to the foreigners, a courtly Chilean economist and a dour Eastern European who retr
eated to the parking lot to smoke. Neither had shown up today. Méndez paced the sideline alone, watching his son.
Juan was eleven. He was fast and skilled, though he insisted on using only his left foot. Méndez blamed himself. Juan had inherited an obsession with Diego Armando Maradona, who remained his father’s all-time-favorite player despite an apocalyptical Argentine slide into squalor. When Juan was little, Méndez had mentioned that Maradona worked his magic almost exclusively with his left foot. Back then, Juan didn’t get many opportunities to talk to his father, so he soaked up everything he said. And he had quietly decided to emulate Maradona’s one-footed style.
Playing wing, Juan served up sharp crosses. He narrowly missed a shot on goal. He flashed a smile as he ran by, his black hair askew. His face was thin and solemn, resembling Méndez’s, but his eyes and hair were his mother’s. Méndez returned the smile.
“Good one, m’ijo,” he called. “That’s the way to do it.”
During much of his son’s life, Méndez had been the state human rights commissioner of Baja California and then the chief of the Diogenes Group police unit of Tijuana. He had missed most of Juan’s sports events and school activities. They had finally begun to spend meaningful time together in the two years since their hurried move to San Diego.
A fringe benefit of exile, Méndez thought.
That was when he noticed the two men across the field.
Guaruras, he thought at first. Bodyguards. Human Dobermans. Slabs of muscle in dark suits.
Looking incongruous, the duo stood behind the opposing team’s bench. They glanced around, men on a mission. They weren’t guarding anyone; they were hunting someone.
As he watched, he got the distinct impression that their stares had come to rest on him. Like dogs spotting a squirrel.
The burly one nudged the bearded one. They set off toward the end of the field. When they rounded the corner flag heading toward his side, Méndez felt a stab of concern. They walked purposefully, robotically, arms wide, their eyes on him.
It occurred to him that they might be detectives or federal agents. Perhaps the Americans wanted his help with an emergency. But he didn’t know any cops in Southern California who wore suits and ties on Saturday morning. Unless they were attending a funeral.
Rip Crew Page 3
