I take a bus from Los Angeles to El Paso. Bus stations don’t have the kind of customers that OmniVore wants to track. If you can’t afford a car or a plane ticket, you’re too far down the food chain to matter. So there are none of the mechanisms Preston could use to find me. No credit cards, no free Wi-Fi, not even that many surveillance cameras. People still pay cash in bus stations, still get their lunches out of a vending machine.
I’m dressed in clothes I got at a Goodwill. Ordinarily, I’d be thinking about who wore them before me, and who died in this seat.
But something has happened. Somewhere along the line, I slipped into mission-mind. It happened all the time back in Iraq. Somehow the distractions—like the hangover of the alcoholic across the aisle, the one who doesn’t realize that pain in his gut is the impending collapse of his liver’s ability to function—recede far into the distance. It’s not like meditation or the intense focus that comes with actual combat. It’s more like the opposite: a kind of enforced dullness where I’m simply observing everything. Asleep on my feet, but ready for the alarm that will wake me up again and turn me loose.
I stay in this zone as I trudge in line across the Stanton Street Bridge into Juárez. There’s no requirement to show a passport or a visa to enter Mexico from this side, so there won’t be any record of me leaving the country.
On every side of me are people. Their thoughts and babble barely register today.
Once I’m on the other side of the bridge, I know I’ve dropped off OmniVore’s radar entirely. Juárez is too poor, too racked with violence and murder, for Preston’s tools to follow me around. Even the CIA would have some trouble finding me here if I chose to disappear.
Preston might even think I’m dead. He’s that kind of optimist, the kind who assumes it will always work out for him, just because it always has. It’s a reflex more than an actual philosophy. Even though there’s no body, no confirmed kill, I’m willing to bet he’s written me off the books already because that’s the reality he prefers.
The smart play would be to let him go on thinking that.
There’s a guy selling cheap phones from a kiosk on the other side of the bridge. I hand over a few dollars and pick up an old iPhone. The screen is cracked, and there’s a picture of someone else’s kids as the wallpaper, but it works. I make the call.
He picks up, because a guy like him cannot let a phone or email go unanswered.
“Hello, Eli,” I say.
There’s a pause, almost a hiccup, as he draws a sharp breath.
“Well,” he says when he finally recovers. “Didn’t expect to hear from you.”
“I won’t keep you long.”
“No, we should talk,” he says. “Things have gotten a little out of hand. I want you to know, I didn’t authorize that. That was a rogue employee, and obviously, he’s already had to pay for his mistake—”
There’s furious tapping on a keyboard in the background. I imagine he’s trying to trace the call, round up the troops. It doesn’t matter.
“Oh, at least try to be a man, Eli. Admit it. It was your idea. You thought you were being bold. You saw yourself as Alexander with the Gordian Knot, didn’t you?”
He could go on denying, but he can’t resist. He wants to take credit. I was in his head. I know him.
He snickers, just a little. “Lateral thinking. Admit it, you never saw it coming. How often does that happen to a psychic?”
“Maybe you should ask Kelsey for a gold star.”
“Hey, that’s what happens when you want to play with the big boys. Sometimes there’s collateral damage. I was told to snip the loose ends, and she was one of them. It’s the cost of doing business.”
For an instant, my vision goes dark around the edges. I bite down hard and shift topics. I don’t want him to think he can get to me.
“You still haven’t told your friends in the CIA.”
“What?” That throws him. “What makes you think that?”
“Because your plan was idiotic. You brought civilians into a private business dispute and put the entire country on terrorist alert. They would have slapped you down instantly if they knew you were going to blow a hole in a nationally known landmark.”
“You used bombs first,” he says, voice sullen.
God. What a toddler. “You didn’t tell them because they still don’t know you lost everything.”
Silence. I can imagine how hard he’s working. Years of work, lost in an instant, no backups. I doubt he’s slept much.
“Have you still got the hard drive?” I hear a tiny hint of hope in his voice. “We could still make a deal.”
“Negotiations are over,” I tell him. “You’ve got nothing I want.”
“Oh, that’s a load. You must want something. Otherwise, why did you call? You have to want something. Come on. Tell me. We can make a deal. Just tell me what you want. What do you want?”
There it is. The edge of panic in his voice.
“I want you to be afraid,” I say. “See you around, Eli.”
I hang up and toss the phone into a nearby trash can.
THE STACK OF bills from the meth dealer has gotten thin, so I have to settle for a chain hotel near the U.S. consulate. It looks like the setting of a crime-scene photo, but the phone works, and that’s all I really need.
I call the contact number of an old client and give my information. I begin with my terrible Spanish, but the person on the other end answers in barely accented English. Then I sit on the bedspread and stare at the stain on the wall.
I don’t have to wait long. Within two hours, two men—both younger than me—show up at my door and ask me to come with them. They’re both extraordinarily polite. They don’t even show me their guns.
They take me to a waiting black Mercedes, and from there, to the airport. We board a small private jet, where I’m installed in a plush leather seat. One of the young men asks if I want anything to eat or drink. I decline.
They take the seats opposite me and spend most of the short flight looking through magazines or checking their phones. Occasionally, one or the other will look over, just to check on me. He will usually smile, eyebrows raised, silently asking if I need anything. I’ll smile back and shake my head. And he’ll go back to his magazine or his phone.
Their minds are remarkably clean and untroubled for hired killers. The ghosts of all the victims trailing them barely make a sound.
WE LAND IN Cancún. The airport is filled with college kids on vacation. They all think they’re on MTV, and they all believe everyone is watching. It’s like I’ve traveled to a different planet, a happy little biosphere populated entirely by healthy young mammals in the prime of mating season.
But this isn’t just a tourist trap. It’s also disputed territory in the drug war. The Zetas used to hold the entire area, but over the last couple of years, two other cartels have united to try to kick them out. At least the Mexican army isn’t involved here, like they are in Juárez and the poorer areas. The government understands that decapitated co-eds are not exactly a boost for the tourist industry, and so do the cartels. That keeps the war simmering offstage, where it doesn’t interfere with the gringos getting sunburns and STDs. The blood only boils over into public view occasionally.
My client, Juan-Gómez Olivarez, is the Zetas’ top man here. To the outside world, he’s one of the chief lieutenants in the cartel, a ruthless drug lord, and a leading candidate to assume control over the whole operation since the arrest of the Zetas’ former leader, Miguel Ángel Trevino Morales.
He’s also a deep-cover DEA plant. His real name is Nathan Giles, and he was born to immigrant parents in Tucson, Arizona. He joined Special Forces after high school, which is where we met: he was on a team that backstopped a couple of my jobs in Afghanistan.
After Nathan got out of the army, he joined the DEA and was sent to infiltrate the Zetas. I think even he was surprised how fast he rose in the leadership, but there’s nothing like a bloody war to advance your career prospects when you’re a soldier. Everyone ahead of you for promotion keeps dying.
His rapid ascent earned him more than a few enemies. Some of his people began to suspect him of being a traitor as his rivals and competitors were busted one too many times. Not long after he was given responsibility for Cancún by no less than Morales himself, Olivarez thought his cover was blown. He heard a corrupt official on the U.S. side of the border might have leaked his true identity.
He was alone. He was afraid. He didn’t have anyone on either side of the law to turn to. But he did have a stupidly huge pile of money. So he hired me to find out who else was keeping his secrets.
I went to Mexico for a week, pretending to be just another soldier for hire looking for work. I met with his men and scanned their minds. Three of them knew who Olivarez really was, and they were all holding on to the secret, waiting for the right time to reveal it and take his place. Cartel politics. I gave their names to Olivarez and went back to L.A.
A few days after that, I saw an item on the Web about a dozen Zetas turning up on the steps of the Juárez courthouse. Their heads had been severed and placed neatly in front of their bodies. The picture that accompanied the article was grainy, and the faces on the heads had been through some serious abuse, but I recognized three of them.
So I have no compunctions about calling in this debt.
THE BODYGUARDS ESCORT me to a suite at the Ritz-Carlton. The Gulf is painfully blue through the patio doors. I barely see it. I fall on the bed and sleep like the dead until there’s a restrained knock on the door.
When I open my eyes, it’s night. The bodyguards are waiting. They escort me downstairs, back into the car. We drive through the streets, out to the edge of the hotel zone, where we turn into a small driveway almost hidden by twenty-foot walls topped with razor wire.
There’s no need to frisk me at the front door—I left my gun at the hotel—but a new bodyguard does it anyway. It’s important to observe the protocols in this world. It’s like exchanging business cards in Japan or trading email addresses in Silicon Valley.
Olivarez himself meets me in the foyer. He looks better than ever: slim, smiling, well dressed.
“You look like shit,” he says pleasantly.
“Been an interesting couple of days.”
He nods. “Tell me about it.”
INSIDE THE HOUSE, everything looks like it’s just been removed from plastic wrap. There’s not a speck of dust on the Saltillo-tile floors or a single painting hanging askew on the walls. The archways over each door must have cost a fortune in man-hours to build. I should tell Tidhar, if I ever see him again: apparently someone does remember how to plaster those.
A pair of extraordinarily beautiful young women appear at Olivarez’s side, not saying anything, just following him from room to room. He finally finds the right setting: a huge living room with the air-conditioning on high and a roaring fire in a central fireplace. He installs himself on a white couch and gestures to a leather armchair for me.
“Still a whiskey drinker?” he asks, and says something in rapid Spanish to one of the girls, not waiting for a reply. She brings me a tumbler with dark liquid and a single sphere of ice.
I sip. Something single malt, appropriately aged, a little spicy. Gorgeous.
“Good Lord,” I say. “Lagavulin?”
He nods. “Thirty year.”
I tip the glass in his direction. He shrugs and pours himself a glass of Herradura.
“I still prefer vodka, but you try drinking anything other than tequila around here, you get shot.”
I admit, it’s fascinating to watch him up close. He’s compartmentalized himself so completely it’s like there are two people sitting with him. I can almost see their shadows.
There’s Nathan, the kid who grew up in a crappy part of town and made something of himself, who still believes in truth, justice, and the American Way, who came down here to fight the bad guys.
To do that, he became the bad guy. He turned into Olivarez, the enforcer, the drug lord, the nightmare supervillain of the cartoonish propaganda of the War on Drugs. He’s racked up a body count maybe thirty or forty times greater than his kills in Afghanistan, directly and indirectly. He’s been responsible for millions of kilos of drugs crossing the border.
There is even a part of him that enjoys the excess. He is rich beyond measure. There are beautiful women who will do anything for him, installed like expensive fixtures in his home. He is respected and feared.
And at the same time, he’s considered a hero, because he is stopping the people who do the very same things he does every day.
The DEA allows Olivarez to get away with the things that Nathan is supposed to be fighting. Nathan allows Olivarez to do horrible things because he believes in the greater good. Olivarez goes on killing.
But no one will stop the cycle. The information he’s getting is too good. The DEA has never had a source this highly placed. They’re finally arresting the big names, the top cartel leaders. No one wants to turn off the spigot.
Nathan knows he is stuck here until someone finally kills him—both of him. And he’s quietly going crazy in the middle, wondering who is real and who is the invention.
I do not want to be around when the strands of his personality, pulled in competing directions for so long, finally snap. But he’s holding it together for now. And he owes me. Which is all I really need.
“So what’s up?” he asks. He’s enjoying using the voice of the kid from Tucson. A decade or so has dropped off his face.
I look at the women. He waves a hand. “Please. They don’t speak any English.”
I smile. “You sure about that?”
The kid vanishes. The drug lord returns. He’s suddenly all business. “Which one?”
I incline my head toward the girl on the right. Her eyes go wide, but otherwise she manages to keep her composure.
Olivarez doesn’t say anything about it to her in front of me. He dismisses them in Spanish.
The woman is worried as she leaves the room. She doesn’t know what Olivarez will do to her. Neither does he. Not yet.
I try not to think about it. It’s not why I’m here.
“Well, you’ve earned your drink,” he says. “So now you can tell me what you really want.”
There’s something liberating about being able to tell your secrets to someone who’s forced to keep them. Olivarez is one of the few people in the world I can trust, because what I know about him is so much more dangerous than what he knows about me.
I explain what has happened as best I can. He listens to the whole tale of woe, asking questions at the right time when he needs clarification. Then he delivers his verdict: “You’re fucked.”
I smile at that.
“Sorry, I know you’re a psychic ninja and all that, but you’re never going to get close to Preston. You probably scared him away from you forever.”
“Not as long as I’ve got the hard drive. He’ll keep coming until he gets it.”
“If what you say about his business is true—if he needs what you’ve got so badly—he’s got maybe six months, tops, before he can’t hide his problems anymore. The CIA will dump him. He won’t make payroll. Why not just hide out for a while? Let him disintegrate on his own.”
“Is that what you would do?”
He looks at me darkly. “You don’t want to know what I’d have to do. I play by different rules.”
I shake my head. “Not this time,” I say. “I am going to end him.”
He sighs and rubs his eyes, but he gets it. He doesn’t need any further explanation, not with his life. Once there was a kid from Tucson who believed in justice, but his career, like mine, has taught him better. Justice is too much to ask from primates like us. We’re not wired for it. You can talk about abstract concepts and we’ll nod and smile, but as a species, we’re barely five hundred years from tearing the hearts out of virgins to ensure a good harvest. When it comes down to the limbic system, where our bodies do the thinking for us, all we really understand is an eye for an eye. We try to codify that, farm out the hard work to the cops or soldiers, dress it up with language. It doesn’t matter. We need to see the blood in the dirt, or it just doesn’t count.
Olivarez knows that there’s an economic value to revenge, which is why we always talk about it like we’re talking about money. No matter what it costs, the lesson is worth it: here is a line that must not be crossed. Touch me and mine, and this is what will happen to you. You owe me for what you did. And I will make you pay.
“You must already have a plan,” he says.
“Got a computer around here?” I ask.
He opens a drawer in an eighteenth-century desk and pulls out a laptop. It’s slow to boot up—“Took me forever to get the fucking Wi-Fi working here,” he mutters—then he hands it over.
I type in a site address and show it to him.
Preston will be the keynote speaker at the FutureTech conference next week. In Dubai.
“Dubai?” Olivarez looks skeptical. “Come on, Smith. Dubai? If there’s one place in the world he could expect to be safe, it would be Dubai.”
“Exactly,” I say.
He snorts. “You think I can get you into the country without anyone else noticing?”
I sigh. It’s late, and I’m tired. “Nathan.” I use his real name. Just to tell him I’m serious. “Why do you think I’m here? I already know you can.”
I’VE GOT A few days before my transport will be ready. Olivarez keeps me at the hotel, stations a bodyguard nearby, and arranges for a black credit card with a fake name. He sends over a tailor, who cuts me three good suits. I take the sheen off the card in the malls and shops until I look like a respectable traveler again. I accept a brick of cash as well, roughly twice as thick as what I got from the meth dealer, all crisp new hundreds. A bodyguard brings it to my hotel room. He even has me sign a receipt.
We call it a loan. We both know that there’s very little chance Olivarez will have to send someone to collect.
If I don’t pay him back, it’s because I’m already dead.