The Professor was experiencing one of the spectacles synesthesia produced in times of stress or excitement. This being a time for both, the show was a fantastic display of sound and light. The landscape, bathed in the spectral glow of his night-vision goggles, sang a tremulous note in his mind, like a bow scraping a single-string instrument; Valencia’s voice as he gave a final briefing to his troops lowered shimmering white curtains into the goggles’ greenish, luminescent pools. I want the son of a bitch alive. We do not move in until she’s finished. No firing except on express command. Do you understand? No firing unless I order it. We don’t want another fuckup. Someone murmured, Sí, mi capitán. Others followed, each hushed response creating a kaleidoscopic sparkle before the Professor’s eyes.
They were twelve, as many as could be mustered on short notice: Valencia with seven paratroopers, the Professor with three federal policemen. They shouldn’t need any more to arrest two men, only one of whom was capable of offering resistance. Assuming, that is, that the information they’d pried out of the nurse and those two Indians at the roadblock was accurate. No reason to think it wasn’t.
They would approach San Tomás on foot; it was about half a kilometer distant. To draw any closer in the SandCats would give them away. Both vehicles had been backed into an oak grove a few meters off the road and hastily camouflaged with netting and branches. The Professor thought that was unnecessary—it was a moonless night, so the chances of anyone spotting the SandCats under the trees were nil—but the army had its own way of doing things. Leaving the drivers behind to guard the troop carriers, the remaining ten men set off, every loose piece of equipment secured with tape or Velcro straps to dampen the noise. The Professor’s sensory spectacle had ended. He was glad; it was becoming a distraction. He heard only the soft crunch of boots, and saw only what was there: the tree-bordered road ahead, looking in his goggles like a tunnel illuminated by faint green lamps.
Valencia halted the column to check his GPS. Two hundred fifty meters, he whispered. There was tension in his hushed voice, a mixture of anxiety, impatience, and a restrained eagerness. This operation was more to his liking, everyone properly equipped and attired—the paratroopers in cammies, the federales in black—for his moment of final triumph. If they captured Salazar, Valencia wanted full credit to go to the army, with the Federal Police cast as supporting actors. The Professor agreed. He had no interest in glory, which was nothing more than a word. Maybe the capitán would invite him to the ceremony when they pinned a major’s star on his shoulders.
A coyote sent up a long call, and the pack answered with what sounded like cackling in a madhouse, raising howls from the village dogs. All to the good. The racket would muffle the raiders’ movements. They went on at a brisk walk, until Valencia halted them again. San Tomás appeared ahead. It was as if the lime-colored light of the night-vision goggles had conjured it out of the blackness, a ramshackle Brigadoon, mud-brick huts and shanties scattered across two shallow hills divided by the road. The whole village was dark, except for lanterns glimmering from atop the hill on the right. The house where the gringa doctor was repairing Julián Menéndez, a.k.a. Ernesto Salazar. Valencia deployed his troops, sending two men down the road to block its use as an escape route, two more to circle around to the rear of the house, keeping enough distance between them and it to avoid detection. The Professor overcame, temporarily, his dislike of all things military; he admired the way the men moved—quickly, each one silent as smoke. In a while, three crisp clicks came over Valencia’s radio, followed by three more. The blocking teams were in position. Then Valencia, the Professor, and the remaining men, a paratrooper sergeant and the trio of federales, sprinted in a crouch to hunker down behind the doctor’s truck and wait. The coyotes had ceased their demented warbling, the dogs their howling.
* * *
She had shot Salazar’s arm full of lidocaine and fed him an oral meperidine. He lay flat on the table, semiconscious, his feet dangling over the edge. The bullet had come out more easily than she’d expected, the tip flattened and peeled back so that it looked like a small flower with wilted petals. Mata policías. Cop killer. What a lovely term. The round had chewed through his shoulder muscle but had not smashed the bone, the armored vest having slowed its terrible velocity. After cleansing and suturing the puncture, she began to debride his upper arm, which had gone from dark red to purple; it resembled an elongated eggplant. Her scalpel sliced off thin layers of necrotic flesh bit by bit, Anna lifting the strips with the forceps, dropping them into a pail. The two women wore surgical masks to cloak the stench of pus and rot. Enrique muffled his nose and mouth with a bandanna, giving him even more of an outlaw look. Lisette had turned him into an operating-room assistant; he held the drip bag containing flucloxacillin over the prostrate Salazar. For a narco tough guy, he’d proved to be squeamish and whiny, shutting his eyes as Lisette cut, complaining that his arm was getting tired from holding the bag. “Switch hands, then,” Lisette snapped. She assumed he wanted to keep the right one free to draw a pistol if he had to.
Her fervent hope was, of course, that he wouldn’t have the time, that the cops and soldiers who had followed Anna would swoop in and arrest him and the “great man” without a shot being fired. If, that is, they had followed her nurse. Focused on her task, she’d evicted all thoughts of what might happen to her if she were shanghaied into the role of Salazar’s personal physician. Yet an exhilaration ran beneath her fear, the two emotions parts of the same stream, current and undercurrent in seamless friction.
Salazar’s eyes were glazed; if not for their occasional blinking, they could have been mistaken for a dead man’s. In the light cast by the LED lamp and the kerosene lanterns hung overhead, she sliced and snipped, sliced and snipped. His bicep had a shallow but distinct concavity before she found healthy tissue. There was no discoloration below the elbow; she might have arrested the gangrene’s spread. Looking at the bullet wound, stitched up neat as a button, and at the smooth, red scoop in his upper arm brought a sense of accomplishment, of pride in skills she hadn’t known she had. Her first surgery, and under conditions a Civil War surgeon would have found familiar. Some baptism. Pulling her mask down, she swiped the back of her hand across her damp forehead, peered into Salazar’s face, and said, “It’s done.”
He rolled his head, mumbling something.
“He will keep his arm?” asked Enrique as he untied the bandanna. Spittle glistened on his mustache. “He must not lose his arm.”
“We will see,” Lisette said, shocked by the thought that sprang into her mind: Well, he’s got another one. She told Anna to swab and pack the wound bed with dry gauze.
The nurse delved into the tote bag and said, “We do not have enough. There is more in the truck,” in the stilted manner of a kid auditioning for a high school play. She flicked her eyebrows at Lisette, then glanced sidelong, toward the pickup parked at the roadside below.
Lisette understood, or thought she did. A deep fatigue overtook her suddenly; resisting an urge to lie down, she grabbed the LED lantern, telling Enrique not to lower the drip bag. That, she thought, will keep one hand occupied—his right, it was to be hoped.
Outside, as they scurried to the truck, Anna said, under her breath, that she’d been told to vacate the ramada when the operation was over. The police and soldiers did not want to risk getting her or Lisette hurt when they made the arrest.
“The gauze—that’s all I could think of to get us out of there.”
“I figured,” Lisette said.
Prepared for a surprise, she made no sound when, as she stepped around to the driver’s side, someone crouching behind the pickup seized her wrist and pulled her down beside him. “Be quiet, stay right here,” he whispered in perfect American English. A DEA agent maybe? There were a few more men with him—black, almost shapeless forms pressed against the doors. One of them spoke briefly into a radio, but in a voice so subdued she could not make out what he said.
“Only the two? No one else?” the English speaker asked, his mouth to her ear.
“There’s a family inside the house.” Her arms and scalp prickled, her heart thudding against her rib cage. Not fear—a weird elation, rather. “Please, no shooting if you can help it.”
“We want them alive, don’t worry,” he assured her; then he and the others rose and started up the hill, jog-trotting in single file. Anna, right next to her, crossed herself, kissing the tips of her fingers.
* * *
The ramada jutted out from the back of the house. They moved up to the front to conceal their approach. Valencia with his sergeant crept toward one side of the ramada, while the Professor with his men went around to the other. Julián Menéndez had escaped him twice, the first time ten years ago, when he’d rescued the hostages seized by Julián’s mother. There would be no strike three. In deposing Carrasco, the skinny maricón had wrecked a good thing, a more or less orderly, highly profitable enterprise. And now Julián’s head was filled with dizzy ideas of revolution, of waging some sort of holy war on behalf of his mongrelized Christian-voodoo-narco creed. Braced against a wall of the house, the Professor felt an electric current pulsing up and down his backbone—the sensation of unfinished business about to be finished.
Then, voiding himself of all thought and emotion, he stepped around the corner, his H&K in a two-handed grip. In a nanosecond, his brain photographed Enrique Mora, El Serpiente, standing with a plastic bag in his hand, the bag attached to Julián Menéndez’s arm by a flexible tube, Julián supine on a picnic table.
“Policía Federal! No se mueva. Estás bajo arresto!”
Mora’s reaction to the shouted command was as swift and automatic as an eye blink. He whirled and flung the bag at the Professor with the accuracy of a pitcher unleashing a fastball. The long IV tube, torn from Julián’s arm, whipped the Professor’s face as the bag struck his hands, knocking his pistol from his grip. But in that instant, as Mora went for one of the guns in his waistband, Valencia leapt in from behind and delivered a crisp blow to the back of Mora’s skull with a rifle butt. Mora dropped to both knees, tottered, and then fell facedown. One of the federales jammed a knee into his spine, wrenched his arms behind his back, and cuffed him with plastic straps. Rivulets of blood webbed the nape of his neck, staining his shirt collar. The cop rolled him over and disarmed him. A matched pair of stainless steel, pearl-handled semiautos; one of the pistols must have been Julián’s. Collecting his own weapon, and himself, the Professor, along with two federales, lifted Mora to his feet—it took the three of them to do it, since Mora weighed a good one hundred kilos—then sat him on the table’s bench, clamped one end of a pair of plastic handcuffs to his, and bound the other end to the wrist of Julián’s good arm, streaked with blood leaking from the vein where the IV tube had been inserted. They maneuvered Julián off the table, onto the bench, and there the fugitive pair sat side by side. Julián, drugged and in pain, his lips compressed, stared in glassy bewilderment. And no wonder, with a stitched bullet hole in his shoulder and, below it, what looked like a salami sliced lengthwise.
“As I was saying, you’re under arrest,” the Professor noted with a mocking air that concealed a savage urge to pistol-whip Julián. But it wasn’t only the desire for revenge, or to punish, that bred the impulse. The Professor felt a bit cheated. The bust had been too easy, too quick; he would have liked a fiery climax.
Valencia removed a handheld from a cargo pocket and radioed the drivers, ordering them to bring up the SandCats. He glowed, he sparkled: Julián and Mora would be taken to the base, the media alerted, and he would perp-walk them past the cameras like a Caesar parading captive kings.
The Professor dug a thumb under Julián’s chin, jerked his head up and held it there, forcing Julián to look straight into his face.
“You’re not Ernesto Salazar, you’re Julián Menéndez—let’s be on the up-and-up with each other, all right? It’s been a long time, but I haven’t changed that much. Do you recognize me?”
Julián blinked and croaked, “No.”
“You will when you’re feeling better. Care to tell us what happened at your birthday fiesta?”
Julián did not say anything.
“How about you, Enrique? Rubén Levya shot Julián for some reason, then you or both of you killed him.”
“There was a disagreement,” Mora said, gritting his teeth against the ache in his skull.
“More detail would be helpful. You put at least a dozen bullets into him.”
“Only a dozen? We must have missed with a few.”
The Professor laughed but without mirth. “All right. These questions can wait. We’ll have all kinds of time to get them answered.”
“I answer you now,” Mora said. “Your trick didn’t fool Don Ernesto. He saw you coming out and he knew you weren’t músicos but fucking chotas. We put on our vests and got ready. But that traitor Levya, he drew his pistol and takes a shot at the boss, and then we fucked him up. Okay? Now you know. Now you tell me how you did it. How did you turn him?”
“You don’t ask questions,” the Professor said. “We do.”
“And I have one I want answered,” Valencia said. “Three months ago, an army patrol was ambushed, a video made of the soldiers’ executions. Who did this? What were the sicarios’ names?”
Neither prisoner answered. Julián probably wasn’t capable of answering. Taking the good-cop role, the Professor told him, in an avuncular tone, that if they had wanted to kill him and his number two, they would have. Personally, he didn’t give a damn who had been in on the ambush, who had made the video, who had staged the fake executions; but this information was important to the capitán …
Julián turned to him. He, too, hadn’t changed all that much in the past decade: his face was fuller and more lined, but he had the same sand-colored hair, with its slightly reddish tint, the same faint spray of freckles across his cheeks—inheritances from his half-Irish mother. A startled recognition flared in Julián’s eyes.
“You! You!” he cried out, in English.
“Ah, you’re feeling better. Sí, soy yo. I’ve waited ten years to put you away.” The Professor flashed a jovial, careless smile. “Which do you prefer? English or Spanish?”
Mora made a rumbling sound in his throat, like someone hawking up a lungful of phlegm. “Stop fucking with him. That’s a great man you’re fucking with. A man chosen to rid Mexico of tyrants, like the ones you work for.”
“You seem to be feeling muy valiente, Enrique,” said the Professor.
“I don’t give a shit, that’s why.”
“Then maybe we should fuck with you,” Valencia said, standing close enough to poke Mora’s forehead with his rifle muzzle. “If you wish us to fuck with you instead of with the savior of Mexico, we will be happy to do it. We can show you how we fuck with narcos.”
Mora’s heavy lids fell slowly, then rose again, just as slowly.
“Fuck with somebody else.”
“Who?” Valencia made a parody of looking around the ramada. “I don’t see anyone.”
“Then go fuck yourselves.”
“Stop trying to provoke us, Enrique. Your face alone is a provocation. You are extremely ugly. They call you El Serpiente, but that is an insult to snakes.”
“It wasn’t us.… Don’t need to … Not us…”
Julián’s words were so soft and halting that neither Valencia nor the Professor reacted immediately. Julián’s head drooped. Almost in a faint, he leaned against Mora. With the two of them chained together, they looked like some two-headed freak in a carnival show.
“He means we did not spring the ambush,” Mora chimed in. “I wish we did. I wish it had been us and that you shits were in the truck when we did.”
“Enrique, escúchame,” Valencia said. “Do you see this?” He twirled the rifle like a baton so the butt end was aimed at Mora’s face. “This is what hit you in the head. If you say another word except to answer a question, it will hit you in the mouth. It will hit you so hard that you will be shitting your own teeth for a week. Está claro? Inform us. Who was it if it wasn’t you?”
The story had hardly begun before it was interrupted by the SandCat drivers, announcing their arrival, and, right behind them, by the American doctor, Moreno, and her nurse. Entering the ramada, both women took in the scene. The Professor noticed that they hung back for a moment, as if they weren’t quite sure that they were now safe.
“I thank you for what you’ve done,” Moreno said, stepping forward. “I’m not finished with him yet.”
“Then finish and be quick about it,” Valencia said.
Which she was. In under five minutes, she had the arm packed with gauze, bandaged, and immobilized in a sling taped snugly across Julián’s chest. Then Valencia, in his abrupt, captain-of-paratroopers way, ordered her and the nurse to leave; they were finished with the patient, but he wasn’t.
The doctor objected: her patient had to be evacuated immediately and brought to a hospital, because he was in danger of losing his arm.
“I do not give a shit if it falls off this minute,” Valencia snarled. “Go.”
It was the nurse who convinced her. She was plainly terrified by Mora, who had been glaring at her with pure, implacable hatred. He didn’t need superior powers of deduction to have figured out that she was ultimately responsible for the situation in which he and Julián now found themselves.
Mora’s account resumed.
Brotherhood lookouts had spotted the army truck on the road. They went to investigate and found two soldiers lying dead outside, two more inside, all four with pictures of La Santa Muerte pinned to their shirts.
“And then what?” Valencia said, shaking Mora.
But it was Julián who replied: “Someone … tried to make it … make it … look like us…”
“And then what? You expect me to believe you have no idea who those sicarios were?”
Unable to go on, Julián slumped into Mora’s shoulder like a tired child. All the Professor could feel toward him now was utter contempt. The boss of the dreaded Brotherhood, the would-be revolutionary, had chirped like any small-time snitch, eager to prove his innocence. Innocence. You would have an easier time finding a penguin in Mexico than one innocent man.
“You!” Valencia said to Mora. “Then what?”
“It was Levya’s idea.”
“What was?”
“The video.”
“What about the video?”
“Levya … he says, ‘Okay, someone wants to pin this ambush on us, let us take credit, but not for an ambush. For an execution. We will make it look like we captured these paracaidistas and executed them. To show that La Fraternidad avenges the killing of the kids in San Patricio, so the people of the town will come back to our side. Also to show that we are not afraid even of the great paratroopers—’”
“You think I am going to believe that?” Valencia said.
The Professor had had enough of the captain’s obsession. Nudging him to go outside, he followed, then said, quietly, that Mora and Julián could not have fabricated this tale on the spur of the moment.
“They could have made it up before,” Valencia murmured.
“There would have been no need to! They wanted to take credit!” the Professor said, now beyond fed up. He pointed out that the story fit in neatly with their own theory that some unknown gang had staged the ambush. There was no sense in wasting another minute on this sideshow. Time to go, time to load the prisoners in the SandCats and start for the base. It would be close to daybreak by the time they got there.
To his amazement—and gratification—Valencia agreed. They went back inside. But the captain was not quite finished.
“So you collected the bodies and you took them somewhere,” the captain said to Mora. “You tied them to chairs and you shot them, to make your video more entertaining.” His jaw muscles rippled and twitched. “You murdered the murdered men. My men.”
“If that is how you want to put it—”
“Are you still fearless, Enrique? Or are you now afraid of us, the great paratroopers?”
“What do you think?”
Mora’s mouth and nose exploded, a burst of blood and teeth and saliva, of red and white, like a tomato smashed by a hammer. His head snapped backward from the blow of Valencia’s rifle butt, then flipped forward as he tumbled off the bench and onto the floor, gagging and spitting, pulling Julián down on top of him.
“I think if you are not,” Valencia said, “you should be.”