She took him back to the café, where he ordered burritos de machaca and a huge plate of cowboy beans larded with chiles pasados. His name was Álvaro Obregón. He was from Chihuahua. His family had migrated north in search of work and had ended up here. Through the intervention of his mother’s brother, his parents worked at a maquiladora packaging fruit and vegetables. According to him, his sister was a slut and his brothers goofed off all day instead of working. He himself was employed by a rancher. He’d come into town to pick up an order of supplies the rancher had phoned in.
“At first, I was excited about coming here,” he said. “I’d read up about American Nogales and discovered that a lot of really cool people were born here, like Charlie Mingus. His music sounds like shit to me, but you know, he’s famous and all. And then there’s Roger Smith. Imagine banging Ann-Margret, huh! But the coolest is Movita Castaneda. I bet you never heard of her.”
When Soraya said she hadn’t, he grinned. “She was in Flying Down to Rio and Mutiny on the Bounty, but I only saw her in Tower of Terror.” He mopped up the last of his beans. “Anyway, she married Marlon Brando. Now, there was one cool actor, until he blew up like a blimp, anyway.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and smacked his lips. “It didn’t take long for the shine to wear off. I mean, just look around you. What a fucking dump!”
“You seem to have a good job,” Soraya pointed out.
“Yeah, you try it. It sucks.”
“It’s steady work.”
“A rat makes more money than I do.” He gave a wry, lopsided smile. “But that doesn’t mean I starve to death.”
“Which brings us back to my original question. I want to get into Mexico.”
“Why? The place is a fucking shithole.”
Soraya smiled. “Who do I see?”
Álvaro Obregón made a show of having to think about it, but Soraya suspected he already knew. He looked out over the square. The lights had come on, people were on their way to dinner or heading home after some last-minute shopping. The air smelled of refried beans and other sharp, acidic scents of norteño cooking. Finally, he said, “Well, there are a couple of local polleros across the border.” These were people whom you paid to guide you across the border without having to bother with customs and Immigration. “But really, there’s only one to use, and you’re in luck, early this morning he brought a family of migrants across from Mexico. He’s here now and I can make the introductions. He’s known as Contreras, though I know for a fact that’s not his real name. I’ve dealt with him personally.”
On that score Soraya had no doubt. “I’d like you to set up the meet with your compadre Contreras.”
“It’ll cost you. A hundred American dollars.”
“Highway robbery. Fifty.”
“Seventy-five.”
“Sixty. That’s my last offer.”
Álvaro Obregón put his hand on the table palm-up, and Soraya laid a twenty and a ten onto it. The bills disappeared so fast they might never have existed.
“The rest when you deliver,” she said.
“Wait here,” Álvaro Obregón said.
“Save time and call him, why don’t you?”
Álvaro Obregón shook his head. “No cell contact, ever. Rules of the game.” He rose and, seemingly in no particular hurry, sauntered off at the leisurely pace endemic to Nogales.
For just over an hour Soraya sat alone, soaking up the spangle of the night and the lilt of songs of a local banda, playing a form of brass-heavy music from Sinaloa. A couple of men asked her to dance; politely but firmly she turned them down.
Then, just as the banda segued into its second cumbia, she saw Álvaro Obregón emerge out of the shadows. He was accompanied by a man, presumably Contreras, the pollero, whom she judged to be in his early to midforties with a face like a map that had been folded and refolded too many times. Contreras was tall and rangy with slightly bowed legs, like a lifetime cowboy. And like a cowboy he wore a wide-brimmed hat, stovepipe jeans, and a western shirt with piping and pearl snaps.
The man and the boy sat down without a word. Up close Contreras had the sun-bleached eyes of a man used to sagebrush, dust, and the scorching desert. His skin resembled overtanned leather.
“Boy tells me you want to go south.” Contreras spoke to her in English.
“That’s right.” Soraya had seen eyes like his before in professional gamblers. They seemed to bore into your skull.
“When?”
A man of few words, that was all right with her. “The sooner the better.”
Contreras lifted his head to the moon, as if he were a coyote about to howl at it. “Just a sliver,” he said. “Tonight’ll be better than tomorrow, tomorrow’ll be better than the next. After that…” He shrugged, as if to say the door would close.
“What’s your fee?” she asked.
He gazed at her again in a neutral way. “Can’t bargain with me like you did with the boy.”
“All right.”
“Fifteen hundred, half up front.”
“A quarter, the rest when you’ve brought me safely across.”
Contreras’s mouth gave a little twitch. “You were right, boy, she is some kinda bitch.”
Soraya wasn’t offended; she knew it was meant as a compliment. That’s how these people spoke, she wasn’t going to change it and she wasn’t about to try.
Contreras shrugged then and began to stand up. “I told you.”
“Tell you what,” Soraya said, “I’ll meet your terms if you take a look at a photo for me.”
Contreras studied her for a moment, then eased back into the chair. He held out his hand, just as Álvaro Obregón had. The boy learned quickly.
Soraya scrolled through the photos on her cell until she found the surveillance shot of Arkadin. She laid the phone in the pollero’s palm. “Have you seen him? You might have taken him south maybe nine or ten days ago.” That’s what she surmised from Álvaro Obregón’s tale of the black Chevy abandoned in the desert: Arkadin had found a way into Mexico that bypassed official scrutiny.
Contreras did not look down at the photo, but kept his colorless eyes on her. “I don’t bargain,” he repeated. “Are you asking me for a favor?”
Soraya hesitated a moment, then nodded. “I suppose I am.”
“Don’t do favors.” He glanced down at the photo. “My fee is now two thousand.”
Soraya sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. “Now you’re taking advantage of me.”
“Decide,” Contreras said. “A minute more and we’ll call it an even three thousand.”
Soraya exhaled. “Okay, okay.”
“Let’s see the color.”
He meant he wanted to see the money, all of it, to make sure she’d be able to pay. When she had unrolled the hundred-dollar bills to his satisfaction, he nodded.
“Took him across ten days ago.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
Contreras snorted. “Didn’t say a fucking thing, not even when he handed me the money. That was fine by me.”
Soraya played her last card. “Where do you think he was going?”
Contreras lifted his head a moment, as if sniffing something on the wind. “Man like him, not into the desert, that’s for sure. I could see he hated the heat. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to work at one of the maquiladoras in Sonora. This was a boss, his own man.” His gaze lowered and he squinted at her. “Like you.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“The coast, lady boss. Sure as we’re sitting here he was going to the coast.”
Bourne was asleep when the call from Chrissie came in. The sound of his cell woke him instantly, and he pressed a thumb against his eye as he answered the call.
“Adam.”
Instantly alerted by the tension in that one word, he said, “What’s happened?”
“There’s… there’s someone here who wants to speak with you. Oh, Adam!”
“Chrissie, Chr
issie…”
An unfamiliar male voice took over: “Stone, Bourne, whatever you’re calling yourself. You’d better get over here. The woman and her daughter are in very deep shit.”
Bourne gripped the phone more tightly. “Who are you?”
“My name is Coven. I need to see you, right now.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m going to give you directions. Listen carefully, I won’t repeat them.” Coven rattled off a complicated list of highways, roads, turns, and mileage. “I expect you here in ninety minutes.”
Bourne glanced at Moreno, who was gesturing at him. “I don’t know whether I can make it by—”
“You’ll make it,” Coven assured him. “If you don’t, the little girl gets hurt. For every fifteen minutes you’re late, she gets hurt worse. Do I make myself clear?”
“Perfectly,” Bourne said.
“Good. The clock starts ticking now.”
14
FREDERICK WILLARD SPENT eight straight hours connected to the Internet, trying and failing to find out who owned the Monition Club, what the organization did, where it got its money, and who its members were. During that time he took three breaks, two to use the bathroom and one to wolf down some very bad Chinese food he’d ordered online and had delivered. All around him workmen were renovating the new Treadstone offices, installing electronic equipment and specially designed soundproofed doors, and painting walls that the day before had been stripped of wallpaper.
Willard had the patience of a tortoise, but at last even he gave up. He spent the next forty minutes down on the street, walking around the block, clearing his head of paint fumes and plaster dust while he thought the situation through.
At the end of that time he returned to his office, printed out his résumé, and then went home to shower, shave, and dress in a suit and tie. He made sure his shoes were highly polished. Then, the résumé folded and tucked in his breast pocket, he drove to the Monition Club and parked in a nearby municipal underground lot.
There was a certain spring in his gait as he went up the stone steps and into the imposing lobby. The same woman manned the high desk in the center, and he went up to her and asked for the director of public relations.
“We have no director of public relations,” she said with an unsmiling face. “How may I help you?”
“I wish to see the person in charge of hiring personnel,” Willard said.
The woman looked at him dubiously for a moment, then she said, “We aren’t hiring.”
Willard put some honey into his voice and smiled. “Nevertheless, I would very much appreciate you telling whoever’s in charge that I would like to see him—or her.”
“You’d need to have a résumé with you.”
Willard produced it.
Eyeing it, the receptionist smiled and said, “Your name?”
“Frederick Willard.”
“One moment, Mr. Willard.” She dialed an internal extension and murmured into the microphone of her wireless headset. When she had disconnected she looked up at him and said, “Please have a seat, Mr. Willard. Someone will be out shortly.”
Willard thanked her, then walked back to the same bench where he and Peter Marks had waited for Oliver Liss. The receptionist went back to answering the phone and directing calls. Willard thought this system oddly antiquated. It appeared as if the personnel who worked at the Monition Club did not have direct phone lines.
This interested him, and he began to study the woman more closely. Though she was young and at first blush looked like the standard-issue receptionist, he was getting the sense that she was something altogether different. For one thing, she seemed to make the decision of whether or not he was going to get past her. For another, it looked as if she was vetting each call.
After thirty minutes or so a slim young man appeared through a door set flush with one of the wall panels. He was dressed in a charcoal-gray conservatively cut suit. His tie had what appeared to be a gold bar embroidered in its center. He went directly over to the receptionist and, bending forward slightly, spoke to her in a voice so low that even within the confines of the hushed lobby Willard could not hear what he said or what the receptionist replied.
Then he turned and, with a noncommittal smile on his face, approached Willard.
“Mr. Willard, please follow me.”
Without waiting for a reply, he turned on his heel. Willard went across the lobby. As he passed the receptionist’s desk, he saw her watching him.
The young man took him through the door and down a dimly lit, wood-paneled corridor. It was carpeted and decorated with paintings of medieval hunting scenes. They passed doors on either side. All of them were closed, and Willard could hear nothing at all inside. Either the offices were empty, which he doubted, or the doors were soundproofed—yet another anomaly for a workplace. At least, one that wasn’t part of the clandestine services.
At length, the young man stopped in front of a door on the left, knocked once, then opened the door inward.
“Mr. Frederick Willard,” the young man announced in a curiously formal manner as he stepped across the threshold.
Following him, Willard found himself not in an office but in a library, and a surprisingly large one, at that. Bookshelves lined three of the walls from floor to ceiling. The fourth wall was an immense picture window that looked out on a small but beautifully landscaped cloister garden with a central fountain in the Moorish style. It looked like something out of the sixteenth century.
In front of this window was a large refectory table of a thick, dark hardwood, polished to a high gloss. Seven high-backed wooden chairs were arranged at regular intervals around the table. In one sat a man with rounded shoulders, thick hair pushed back from his wide forehead in silver wings, and skin the color of honey. A large, very thick book was open in front of him, which he was studying with great concentration. Then he looked up, and Willard was confronted by a pair of piercing blue eyes, a large, hawk-like nose, and a hard smile.
“Come in, Mr. Willard,” he said, that hard smile fixed in place. “We’ve been expecting you.”
They use pleasure craft—very expensive yachts,” Contreras said.
“To go up and down the coast,” Soraya said.
“That’s the safest way to transport goods up from central Mexico, where they’re received from the Colombian cartels.”
The desert sky was huge, so chock-full of stars that in certain places the night seemed hazed an icy blue. The barest crescent of a moon hung low in the sky, giving off precious little illumination. Contreras checked the dial of his watch; it seemed he had the schedule of the patrolling migras down to a science.
They were crouched in the deep shadow thrown by a clump of sagebrush and a giant saguaro cactus. When they spoke it was in the barest of whispers. She followed the pollero’s lead so that, like his, her voice sounded no different than the dry desert wind.
“Your man is into drugs, count on it,” Contreras said. “Why else does a man like him want to sneak into Mexico?”
It was colder here than she had expected, and she shivered a little.
“Unless someone was meeting him, he would have gone straight to Nogales, stolen a car, and then headed due west to the coast.”
Soraya was about to reply when he put a forefinger to his lips. She listened, and a moment later she heard what had alerted him: the soft crunch of boot soles across the ground not far from them. When a spotlight was switched on Contreras didn’t even twitch, which meant he had been expecting it. The light swung in an arc, not at the area where they were hidden, but ahead of them, where the invisible border stretched, desolate and windblown. She heard a grunt, then the light was switched off and the sound of the boot soles faded away.
She was about to shift position when Contreras grabbed her and held her still. Even in the starry darkness she could feel his eyes glaring at her. She held her breath. A moment later the beam of blinding light re-ignited, sweeping a larger portion of the desert ahea
d. Then three shots exploded into the night, sending up tiny dust devils where the bullets impacted the earth.
She heard a brief gurgle, which might have been a laugh. The light was extinguished. Then all was stillness again, and the lonesome soughing of the wind reasserted itself.
Now we go, Contreras mouthed to her.
She nodded, following him on cramped legs as they skirted the clump of sagebrush and, circling to the right, dashed across the flat ground from the United States into Mexico. There was nothing at all to mark their transition from one country to another.
In the distance she heard the howl of a coyote, but couldn’t tell from what side of the border it came. A jackrabbit, springing out of their way, startled her. She found that her heart was racing, and there was an odd sort of singing in her ears, as if her blood were rushing too quickly through her veins and arteries.
Contreras led her forward at a steady pace, never stopping, never at a loss for direction. His confidence was absolute, and she felt secure within the circumference of it. It was an odd and slightly unsettling feeling, one that made her think of Amun, of Cairo, and of their time in the Egyptian desert. Could it have been just weeks ago? It seemed like such a long time since she’d seen him, and their text messages were becoming fewer and shorter as time went on.
The night was now starless, as profoundly dark as the bottom of the ocean, as if even hours from now there would be no dawn, no sun rising in the distant eastern sky. A sudden crack of thunder came to her, but it sounded far away, streaking through the sky of another country.
They walked for a long time, through a flat, monotonous landscape that seemed scarcely alive. At last, Soraya saw the glow of lights, and shortly thereafter Contreras led her into Nogales, Sonora.
“This is as far as I go,” the pollero said. He was looking not toward the lights, but out into the blackness of the eastern outskirts of town.
Soraya handed him the balance of his fee, and he pocketed it without counting it.
“The Ochoa has clean rooms, and the management doesn’t ask questions.” Then he spat casually between his dusty cowboy boots. “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he said.
The Bourne Objective (2010) Page 21
