Chapter One

The Even Greater Wall

Jimmie Bernwood didn’t know what was more suffocating: the darkness or the stale air. How far below the surface were they now? Forty, fifty feet? As long as the concrete-reinforced tunnel didn’t collapse, he supposed it didn’t much matter.

Jimmie heard a cough behind him. A deep, phlegmy cough. The old man. The moment he’d seen the man’s sunken face and withered body in the back of the Toyota, he’d pegged him as a goner. Unfit to army-crawl underneath a limbo stick, let alone the mile and a half of tunnel leading to the promised land. Yet here they were, nearly at the end of their journey, and the old man was still breathing. For how much longer, Jimmie couldn’t say.

Sad truth was, the old man wasn’t his problem. Jimmie was simply a journalist on the trail of a story. Once the migrants set foot on the other side of the Even Greater Wall, he would watch as they stumbled off into the desert. He’d take a drink of water from his canteen. Slip back into the tunnel. Repeat the trek a few more times—as many times as it took to get the story. As many times as it took to get inside the heads of the men and women desperate enough to make the dangerous journey. All any of them wanted was a better life. Was that a crime? In the immortal words of Secretary of the Energies Palin, “You betcha.”

Something crunched beneath Jimmie’s forearm. Lots of scorpions and tarantulas down here. Whatever it was, he brushed its crumpled body aside and crawled on. He’d been stung and bitten more times than he could count. His bare arms were as mottled with scabs as a fry cook’s.

What you really had to look out for down here were the bigger pests. Run headfirst into a pack of hungry rats, and say hello to heaven. There was no room to turn around; they’d eat you alive.

Another cough. Even if the old man survived the coming days and nights crossing the no-man’s-land, he wasn’t going to get a job picking fruit. Not in the condition he was in. The last thing anyone hiring migrants wanted to deal with was body disposal. Though they might just let him lie there in the orange grove to fertilize the plants.

Up ahead, he could see a faint sliver of light. The edge of the tarp that covered the opening let a shaft of moonlight through—not much, but just enough. The end was in sight.

Twenty-five minutes later, Jimmie Bernwood was throwing the tarp open and gulping down his first breath of fresh air in hours. Fresh, unpolluted air. It smelled like jobs. Like health care. Like hope.

Thirty-six minutes after that, he was helping the last of the American migrants to their feet in Mexico.

And ten seconds after that, he was staring into a bright light, straight down the barrel of an AR-15.