by David Cole
“Waste of time,” I said. “Stop it, just type ‘Tucson.’”
“I can’t stop it.”
“Not very user-friendly.”
“It’s fairly new. Like the fingerprint database set up by the FBI, takes a lot of programming and data entry to make it accessible. That’s why we’re looking at this prototype. I can only feed it a single entry.”
“What we need,” I said, “is a copy of the entire database.”
“Impossible.”
“Call somebody. Tell them anything, you’ve got a special need, you’re at a temporary field location, you need the data.”
She dialed a number.
“Don’t hope,” she said.
But somebody agreed for a onetime download, warning Michelle that it was a forty-gigabyte file. I waved off her question about the size, and Michelle tucked the phone under her shoulder and typed in four passwords and login IDs until we got to a screen with a single word. DOWNLOAD. She clicked on the word.
“How long will this take?” I asked.
“Forty gigabytes. A while.”
“I’ve got another idea while we’re waiting,” I said. I called Don, who was on the Learjet and passing over Colorado.
“What happened to the search you were going to run about my financial transactions?”
“Contracted it out, haven’t got it yet.”
“Push them.”
“It’s from a guy in Tel Aviv. Probably asleep.”
“Hackers never sleep. Not when there’s money to be made.”
I heard him turn on another cell phone. He called Tel Aviv, woke the hacker up, and within five minutes had his second computer downloading another database, after he’d wired a fifty-thousand-dollar fee to an offshore bank account and the transfer had been verified.
“Call you back,” he said.
“What search?” Michelle asked.
“Those five people I first told you about. I only looked at random banks and financial institutions. Don decided we might as well do a complete search of all their financial holdings.”
“Tell me how you do that,” she asked. “Off the record. Maybe I can learn some new tricks for our own agency.”
23
When I finished explaining, she took another of her folders, struggled with the yellow ribbon which resisted her long nails. Calmly, she opened her center desk drawer, took out a mother-of-pearl folding knife, and extended the three-inch clip blade. She cut the ribbon, closed the knife, and took out another sheaf of papers.
“Meg Arizana,” she said. “Long-time advocate of safe houses for abused women.” She read one page with some interest. “Bipolar, drug user, drug abuser, recently out of drug rehab. You help her transport women to safe houses. You offer them protection, safe journey, safe transit. Right?”
“Meg does most of that. I just drive. Handle scanners. Computer work. Listen, um, can we talk about this black market? In body parts?”
“Okay, I’m getting to that. Indulge me, there’s a connection here that I’m not seeing yet.”
She put the papers back into the folder, closed the flap. She both tilted her head and didn’t automatically square the folder with the edges of the desk.
“I know that Meg Arizana has a lot of money tucked away in a lot of bank accounts. I’m sure she uses that money for these abused women, for her different safe houses, for the…what should I call it, for her cause. But…she does have a lot of money. I believe she was kidnapped because of the money, because they…the kidnapping cartel…they could get their minimum ransom amount.”
“Which is how much?”
“We hear…two to five hundred thousand.”
“Meg doesn’t have that kind of money.”
“If she sold off the thirteen safe houses that she owns outright, she’d be worth several million.”
“But she’d never do that, she’d never sell.”
“Yes, Laura. That’s the problem.”
She touched the fax pages, laid her right palm on them.
“Kidnapped or taken hostage, that’s not my main concern. But the kidnapping cartel…I have some dark things to tell you, Laura. These kidnappings, they’ve been going on for several years in the state of Sonora, in Nogales. But over the last nine months, we’ve been hearing rumors that the cartel has moved north of the border. Taking rich people from Tucson. Phoenix. Scottsdale.”
“How do you know this?”
“A woman talked, privately, to an FBI agent. Actually, this woman heard the FBI was looking into her disappearance as though it were a kidnapping. Her husband runs a major investment firm in Scottsdale. He pulled strings with some state senators, got to the governor, who immediately washed her hands of it by calling in the Feebs. Only six people know what I’m going to tell you. Okay?”
“Six.”
“You can’t repeat this.”
“Sure,” I lied, smoothly, efficiently, quickly. The only way to lie, just do it straight out. “If it will help find Meg, I promise not to tell anybody.”
“The cartel has a simple slogan. When they contact the victim’s spouse, or relatives, or businesses, they make it clear, their slogan is Nobody Dies. If…and it’s a very specific if…if the ransom is paid. If not, the alternative is made clear.”
“But nobody has contacted anybody about Meg. And who? Who would they contact? Her ex-husband? Me?”
“I don’t know.”
The laptop screensaver clicked on. A standard Microsoft thing, a 3-D maze of brick and concrete walls and floors, different colors, sizes, bending and twisting to form a maze. I hit the spacebar, brought up the JPG file of the marina.
“How is this connected?”
“An intercept. Associated with a known IP address…I have no idea what that means…but from the same place, same virtual place, as other messages that we can directly tie to the cartel. We think…our computer people think…this picture might be near to the place the victims are held.”
“If I helped you,” I said hesitantly, “would you give me access to Carnivore? To the whole JWICS network?”
Tilting her head to the other side. First time she’d done that. I realized it had a different meaning, something like, Jesus Christ, what do I do with this woman, how much do I tell her, how much do I trust her?
“Possibly. If you agree to help.”
“No threats about arrest warrants?”
Her mouth turned down in disgust.
“I’m not like them.”
Meaning the U.S. Attorney’s office in Tucson, the men who threatened to send me back to prison on twenty-year-old arrest warrants if I didn’t help them locate hidden bank accounts.
“No strings?” I insisted.
“Only one I can think of. If you need to use JWICS, or Carnivore, somebody else would have to be with you, have to enter certain IDs and passwords that you wouldn’t see. I’m not that powerful, Laura. I can’t give you the keys to the Internet.”
“Okay,” I said reluctantly, still undecided. “Where’s this marina located?”
“It’s in Mexico?” she said quizzically. “It’s on the water. Sea of Cortez? Caribbean? Belize, Nicaragua, it could be anywhere in Central America that’s not mainly jungle. Me, I think…Mexico, I think it’s in…Sonora. We’re trying to match it to pictures of the coastline. It’s only a matter of time before we figure out where it is. But what does this picture mean?”
“What’s the alternative?” I asked, finally understanding what she was telling me. “If the ransom isn’t paid, you said there’s an alternative.”
“Ah. Yes. Actually, that’s the really dark side of all of this. Nobody Dies. Their motto, their…advertising slogan, a bark scorpion, their persuasion, their guarantee. But…if the ransom isn’t paid, the victim will be sold on the black market.”
“As…what?”
Traffic in human cargo. Just like the last mess I worked on.
“As donors.”
“Donors?”
“Eyes, organs, skin,
bones. Everything. It’s a black market for body parts.”
“Whoa,” I said, shoving my chair back violently, raising both hands, palms toward her protectively, “whoa, whoa, this is totally freaking me out.”
“If I were you, I’d be worried even more about revenge.”
“What do you mean, for Christ’s sakes, woman, why are you saying these things? Revenge against Meg? You told me there was another email,” I said. “Something you got with Carnivore. Why aren’t you showing it to me?”
“Right now?”
“Christ, yes. The email. Is it related to that picture?”
“Yes. I think so.”
She pulled a sheet of paper from underneath the stack of folders.
“Here’s what we intercepted. The email to your business address.”
One bitch down, one to go.
“Revenge against both of us?” I said weakly.
“We have no idea. But probably…yes.”
Just what Don had suggested, just what I was trying to avoid.
“I need to make a phone call,” I said.
She swung her office phone around for me to use, but I shook my head.
“If you’re going to use a cell phone, you’ll have to go outside. There’s too much shielding in this building.”
Outside the building, I called Don.
“Yeah?” he said hurriedly. “I’m over Kansas. What’s up?”
“There’s a bonus here,” I said.
“You mean, money up front, bonus at the back end?”
“Not talking money. Talking access to something we’ve always wanted.”
He started to make a flip remark, but knew my voice, knew it was important.
“What?” he said.
“Haven’t you always wanted to really see the insides of Carnivore?”
“Oh my oh my oh my!”
“JWICS?”
“Mother of God!”
“Wait. There’s a bonus…and there’s a risk.”
I went through the whole revenge thing. I’d decided I’d been totally isolated from the office room, so anybody emailing me there had no idea where I actually lived. But it had to be checked against all the clients that Don and I handled, to see who might be likely to want revenge against us. More likely, it was something related to Meg’s safe houses, but I had no idea of most of her business, had no way to track her clients.
But the kidnappings for a black market in body parts…that raised the notion of revenge to a whole new game level. I asked Don if he could make a short list of likely people who’d want revenge on me and Meg.
“Why?” he asked.
I told him about the new email, and the doctored picture of Meg.
“I’m really crazy right now, Don. Help me think this through. I need your sense of clarity.”
“The drug cartel. Peraza? That the name?”
“Yes. But some people tell me that they only took Meg as a hostage, that they really just wanted to kill LynnMay. The woman we were transferring to Nogales.”
“Maybe…maybe…maybe…”
The word echoed in the phone connection, like conversations you have with people halfway around the world when the wireless systems are overloaded.
“Who else?” I asked, once the connection was solid again.
“There is that cop,” Don reminded me gently. “Wheatley.”
“I thought of her. But I don’t think she had any family, any close friends. Her only partners were killed. What’s your guess?”
“I’ll try running some backgrounds. You said Wheatley was half Apache?”
“Maybe…I think so, but it was last year, Don. I’ve worked hard getting those memories out of my head.”
“I’ll run whatever I can. Anybody else?”
“Nobody I can think of. Oh. The year before. The Maxwell woman.”
“Audrey Maxwell. And her son. But they’re both dead. And at the time, we ran all kinds of checks on her. That Iranian computer guy, from the insurance company, he ran very intensive checks. All he turned up was a long string of names from her past. Outside of her son, no family. I’ll run her name again.”
“I’m going down to Nogales. I’ll call you again to check on your flight.”
Michelle stood by my car, a floppy disk in her hand.
“The picture file,” she said, handing me the disk. She went back inside, the key-coded door snapping closed.
“She’s a pistol,” Cruz said, quickly contrite, opening my door.
“I don’t need a driver,” I said.
“So you drive.”
“I don’t need company.”
“So don’t talk.”
He got into the passenger seat and fastened his seatbelt.
“Whoa,” I said, “whoa. What is this?”
“Protection.”
“I’ve got my own protection. Is this Michelle’s idea?”
“Yup. Where we going?”
“Can you take me across the border?” I asked Cruz.
He nodded.
“Just like that? You take me anywhere, no questions asked?”
“She’s a pistol,” he said with a smile. “But she’s the boss. And in addition to all the other things I’ve got to take care of, I’ve been personally directed to take you anywhere. Including across the border.”
“Tell me,” I said to Cruz, “does your office liaison with the policia over there? With the Mexican judicial system?”
“You’ll have to ask Miss Gilbert.”
“I’m asking you because…because I don’t know what to think.”
“You mean, you don’t know who to trust.”
“That too.”
He thought about what he could tell me.
“Everybody is working this situation,” he said finally. “We’re just on different sides. All of us…too many different sides. I can’t help you choose the side you should trust. But I will tell you this. I know all the players here. Yes, I know who you’re going to see. Rey Villaneuva. I worked with him, on a few operations. I know his position. I know about Callaghan and Kanakaredes. I know—”
“Who do you trust?”
“Myself. Most of the time. We going to cross over now?”
“One stop first. I’ve been trying to call Rey, but I don’t know where he is.”
24
It wasn’t really Rey’s house, it was hers.
Rey lived there with his daughter, Amada.
Rented half the house, he’d told me a few months back, when I told him it wasn’t working out, I couldn’t have any kind of relationship with him, I didn’t want to be with him, I didn’t want to hear his voice or have him touch me or kiss me.
He didn’t want to hear the why of it.
It was his way, his…violence, his…guns, I guess that’s what it was.
Too much alike, Rey and Meg.
Rey in Nam. Meg killing the women, Meg with guns. Rey teaching SWAT teams how to do hostage rescue, Rey with guns.
Guns.
I just couldn’t live with so many guns, that was the why of it. But he couldn’t understand because guns were his life. He didn’t like that, actually, he cursed me, said I was just like Meg and that I had my own agenda and cared nothing about his.
That wasn’t true, not true at all. But my therapist said he’d never understand if I tried to explain. Even my therapist had trouble understanding my problems, although I kept telling her it was simple, I just couldn’t live with guns…
Violence, Laura, is the gun, what it does, but it’s not the person.
All right, violence, I couldn’t deal with it anymore.
Violence was everywhere in the world and I wanted to keep it out until I had some kind of normal life.
Whatever normal means.
Three months ago, I figured out that he was sleeping with Conchita. I didn’t really know if that was true or not, but believing it felt good actually, since I was seeing Kamesh, a night clerk from the 7-Eleven market at Fifth Street and Alvernon Way. I like
d Kamesh because he had no more ambition in life than to work a job where he didn’t have to think too much, so when he went home his head was completely free to cook, watch cricket on an obscure cable channel, and keep me company.
I parked at the curb and went up the brick walkway.
The bricks were laid in an obsessively neat, tidy pattern, no one brick more than a quarter of an inch higher or lower than any other brick.
The inside front door was open. I looked through the screen, but saw nobody and couldn’t hear anybody moving. Somewhere in the back of the house a Rolling Stones track was blasting.
I rang the doorbell.
“Oh,” Conchita said. “It’s you.”
She held a tiny plate in her left hand, her thumb over a small tuna fish salad sandwich. I had no idea what time of day it was, I’d lost track of time, and I never wore a watch because I had the Fujiyama with me and it displayed six different time zones. It must be around six o’clock, though, because Conchita always ate dinner on time. Today she wore her gray power suit over a pearl blouse. I knew it wasn’t really silk, it was one of those blouses you get advertised as Feels Like Silk at Half the Price. She was a lawyer, an accountant, a teacher…I never wanted to know what.
Her dark hair black as jet. Slim body, perfect legs, narrow waist, big breasts.
Rey’s kind of woman.
“He’s at work,” she said, ready to close the door.
“Will you tell him I was here? That I need to talk to him?”
“Not a chance.”
“This is urgent, he has to call me.”
I saw her purse just inside the door. I pushed past her.
“Hey!”
She had a Cross gold pen inside the purse, a leather notebook. I wrote down a cell number, dropped pen and notebook back inside her purse.
“Urgent!” I said again. “Have him call me at that number.”
Halfway to my car, she came running toward me. I ducked instinctively, thinking she was going to hit me, thinking there was some jealousy going on.
“Did you think he was living with me?” she asked.
“You just told me he lived here.”
“I mean…sleeping with me?”
