Late in the afternoon, Graciella wasn’t all that surprised to receive a text from her father asking her to call. She knew that Christina’s ashes had been delivered to the drop-off location in Mexico City on Saturday and that they were due to be delivered to El Pescado’s place in Sinaloa on Sunday morning. If you were a cartel boss in Sinaloa, Sunday-morning deliveries weren’t out of the ordinary. Graciella expected their conversation would have something to do with that.
“Good afternoon,” he said when she called him back. Felix Duarte was fluent in both English and Spanish. He always spoke English with Graciella, but she suspected that he addressed his sons solely in Spanish.
“The package arrived safely?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s here. Thank you for that. Lupe doesn’t like it, but too bad.”
“You sound upset,” Graciella said. “Is something wrong?”
“Yes, something’s wrong. It’s Pablo. I think he’s trying to cause trouble.”
“Pablo?” she asked.
“Manny came over this afternoon. He told me that someone from MS-13 pulled off a hit near Tucson, Arizona, last night. Manny has an informant inside the ATF. He says that after that mess in Las Cruces, the ATF is thinking we’re connected to this latest hit.”
“Are you connected?” Graciella asked.
“Absolutely not,” El Pescado replied. “And since it wasn’t Manny and it wasn’t me, it has to be Pablo. He’s got no business running jobs that haven’t been authorized. If that’s the case, I need to put a stop to it.”
When Graciella had procured the services of both the surveillance vendor and the hit man, she’d deliberately seen to it that the Bitcoins that changed hands hadn’t come from her own account. She had every reason to believe that eventually the long arm of the law would connect the dots and come looking. Once they started sifting through the account logs, they would discover that the source of these particular funds came from accounts held in her half brother’s name. If that happened, Pablo would claim, and rightly so, that he knew no one at all in Cottonwood, Arizona, or Marana, either, for that matter; but no one was likely to believe him.
What she hadn’t expected, however, was that El Pescado himself would make the MS-13 connection back to Pablo before the cops did. And if Manny was smart enough to have paid informants of his own working inside the ATF—spies her father knew nothing about—perhaps both she and Felix hadn’t given Manny enough credit, all of which was too bad for Pablo. Since responsibility for the failed hit in Las Cruces had fallen primarily on Pablo’s shoulders, it made sense that he’d be in the hot seat for whatever had happened here as well.
“How can I help?” Graciella asked.
“I want you to check Pablo’s accounts and let me know if he’s made any unusual transfers.”
“And if he has?”
“Then I’ll deal with it,” El Pescado declared.
The chilling finality in her father’s voice left little doubt in Graciella’s mind about what would happen next. El Pescado would see Pablo’s attempt to branch out on his own as a betrayal, and Felix Duarte didn’t tolerate betrayals of any kind. Graciella had no doubt that her father’s response would be swift and brutal. Pablo was divorced and had at least one child. Would the death warrant she was about to hand over to El Pescado extend to Pablo’s former wife and child? If so, it wasn’t her problem.
“All right,” she said aloud. “I’ll look into his accounts and get back to you.”
She was about to hang up, but her father spoke again before she had a chance. “I heard about what happened to Arturo,” Felix said.
Was there a hint of reproach in his voice, as though he thought he should have heard the news from Graciella directly rather than from someone else?
“Yes,” she said. “It’s such a shame. I spoke to Isobel. As far as I know, they still haven’t found the body.”
“Sounds like someone had it in for him.”
“Yes, it does,” Graciella agreed.
“You should take his place,” El Pescado said. “As the top producer in the office, you’d be a natural. All I would need to do is whisper a word in the right ear and the job would be yours.”
Graciella knew that was true. She also knew that she had plans of her own, and being stuck running the office on Vía Israel wasn’t one of them.
“Isobel is far better qualified to handle the day-to-day administrative issues,” she answered. “I’d much rather be in my cubicle working on the front lines than holed up in Arturo’s back office doing paperwork.”
“You’re sure?”
“Very.”
“All right, then,” El Pescado said.
Before he had sounded reproachful. Now he sounded disappointed. Graciella knew that Felix Duarte was unaccustomed to having people tell him no.
“If they put me in charge of the office,” she said, “my accounts would have to be split up and handed off to the other girls. Considering how many of those accounts belong to you, either directly or indirectly, that seems like a bad idea.”
“You’re probably right about that,” her father agreed reluctantly. “But get back to me about the other matter. If Pablo is pulling something behind my back, I need to know about it.”
“I will as soon as I can.”
It wasn’t necessary for Graciella to go into the office or wait until morning to log in to Pablo’s accounts to see what had happened because she already knew exactly what had happened. The MS-13 transfers were there because she herself had made them, using authorization codes that would make them appear to have come directly from Pablo himself.
And so, although she didn’t actually need to log in to her office accounts and wasn’t supposed to be able to do so from home, she logged in anyway. She had settings that called for routine notifications to be sent out if one or another of her accounts had unusual activity. In this case, she saw a notice that Owen Hansen’s long-dormant Bitcoin mining operation was back in business, having come back to life a few hours earlier.
If the Bitcoin operation was up and running, that meant Frigg was up and running as well. That probably also meant that Stuart Ramey had returned to Cottonwood from wherever he’d been over the weekend, and that he would contact her tomorrow with the banking codes.
Almost without thinking, Graciella switched over to the dark Web and logged on to the surveillance storage site to see if there were any new postings from her planted listening devices. There was still no indication that the video equipment had ever come online, but she was happy to find a new audio file. Donning a pair of headphones, she listened in. A female voice, most likely belonging to the young woman named Camille Lee, was speaking to someone else—her father, evidently—on the phone, talking about the artificial intelligence. Almost giddy with excitement, Graciella listened through to the end of the recording and then replayed the entire conversation so she could hear it again.
When it was over, she knew for sure that Stuart Ramey had the AI in his possession, all right, and that he planned on selling it to the highest bidder. What could be better? And one way or another, using her money or her father’s money, Graciella planned on making Frigg her own.
She didn’t call her father back immediately. Instead, she gave herself the luxury of a long celebratory bath in her soaking tub accompanied by a glass of champagne. This was the start, she realized, toasting herself in the mirror. This was the beginning of the dismantling of her father’s empire. It was coming sooner than she had anticipated, but it was coming.
After her bath and after giving El Pescado plenty of time to sit around worrying and wondering, Graciella finally called him back.
“Yes,” she told him over their encrypted connection. “Several unusual transfers have shown up on Pablo’s account lately. The most recent one was on Saturday. Between the amount involved and the tracking information, I’d guess it would lead back to one of the contacts at MS-13.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” El Pescado said. “I’ll take care of it.”
Graciella hadn’t a doubt in the world that he would. Once Pablo was out of the picture, there would be only two more obstacles standing in Graciella’s way. Somehow she hoped that Manny would be the last man standing. She suspected that, in the long run, he would be easier to deal with than El Pescado himself.