Harbaugh drove as Carver shifted around on the back bench seat of the Bronco. For a long time he was quiet and she was alone with her thoughts and worries and memories, the centerline of the highway almost the only real thing as she traveled north and back in time at once. Her thoughts biased toward her father. Moments in his wake at his pantleg. The track, studying a certain gray gelding that lost him a notorious amount of money. A card game she drove him home from, all of thirteen. He was sent to the hospital a few weeks after that with broken ribs, and she realized now how often he’d been a card short, a horse-length shy, chopping cars for parts. Periods he lived in motel rooms. She wouldn’t say she missed a lot of school, but she learned early on it was for suckers, her daddy in an inevitable fury over college tuition, the outrage of having to report an income for her loans. She would become convinced that her going to college was what did him in.
Look at me now, old man. What he’d make of how afield and flung-out she’d become. On the edges, running along the rim, headed for a border. These thoughts of her father and how accustomed she’d become to different derelictions. As an attorney. With Dufresne. With Oscar. She didn’t understand women who felt shame so readily. Her father brooked not a single smithereen of it. And her mother—she kept hers in the bottom of a glass, and never let that tumbler go dry.
Carver pissed himself, but she only knew when he woke and joked about it.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“Just if you look back and I don’t have any pants on.”
She’d learn soon that he didn’t smell like anything, maybe just a little salt that would wind up on her lips, which even then felt like a kind of subterfuge.
But that was later. Right now she feared his obscurities, their every sort, shape, and bulk.
“You want me to stop?”
“Thirty-three.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Inseam’s about thirty-three.”
“Jesus, I thought you were losing your mind again.”
“And none of that bootcut bullshit. Just a good straightleg.”
“I’m certain we’re not anywhere near a tailor.”
“Then I’ll see about it in Monterrey.”
“You don’t have anything you can change into?”
“No.”
“You usually travel so light?”
“I don’t do anything usually,” he said. “I better be quiet now.”
“Okay.”
“Talking’s like hammers in my skull.”
“Shush then.”
He had the keys out and only his boxer briefs on when he opened a heavy noisy gate that gave onto a courtyard dense with palms and an understory of flowers. Brick paths choked with foliage, the moonlight weird to see by. They passed a cat silently slapping a floormat with its tail in front of an apartment door and went up a stairway to the second floor. The landing wrapped around the inner verdant courtyard they’d just passed through, revealing a still and untroubled fountain. Carver moved as though taking stock, as did she.
They went around the landing and she noticed that the second floor had doors on each side of the square. She reckoned eight apartments to the building in all. He let her into the place and cleared all the rooms like a bodyguard and then fixed himself something in the small kitchen. A bubbling concoction, lime-green seltzer. He disappeared into the bedroom and she pondered flight. But it felt already like an old hankering. She set her tote on the couch. She noticed where Carver had left the sack with her phone in it on the counter. She noticed the sicario’s pistol on the same counter. She went to the window to notice things there, looked out over the intersection, cars parked almost to the corner. Storefronts girded with metal gates and padlocks. A paved soccer field.
She prised open the window. It stuck, but the thought occurred that she could jump through it. The street wasn’t far enough to plunge to death, she noticed. She was thinking of herself as a hostage. It was like a dream in her exhaustion, and when he came out with a blanket and pillows and made a bed on the couch, she was so tired her eyes watered. She didn’t argue with him about taking the bedroom.
He was awake when she got up and stumbled out of the pitch-black bedroom into the living room. He’d made up the blankets, and she sat on the couch collecting herself from the dreamless oblivion from which she’d just come. Taking in things anew. The fabric of the old couch as busy against her fingers as a head of cauliflower. The steaming cup of coffee he set on the coffee table before her black as a tar pit. There were decorative swords on the wall, several different cacti that may have been dead, a bowl of fresh fruit. Traffic outside, horns, the skirp and bleat of tires. She noticed that the sicario’s gun was gone, but the sack was still in view. Her phone still inside it. Her eyes flashed away from it when Carver spoke, something about stepping out, there was fruit, some pastries, she should shower, rest again. She feigned more of the state she’d been in—a fugue—then thought better of it and asked how he was.
“Fit as a fiddle,” he said.
She wanted to see if she could make him stay and talk to her. If she had even that much sway.
“What is it that you have?” she asked. “The seizures, I mean.”
“I don’t really know. Hit in my early twenties. Never let on to the Company. It’d be disqualifying.” He could’ve stopped there, but he kept talking. “They’re rare, and I can feel them coming on. At the FOB, I’d hit the latrine or jump in a Hummer.” He shrugged. “Grandpa had fits. Older than dirt when he died, though. It’s just a thing. Like a cowlick or a birthmark.”
She was listening harder than she meant to. Taking this information in a kind of thirst.
“You be all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she snapped.
“I just meant while I’m gone a few hours. Gonna get new wheels.”
She nodded.
“We’ll get you to the States.”
“Okay,” she said.
He patted his pockets, made to leave.
“What did you mean when you called me a fellow traveler?”
He stopped. Turned around. Squared himself in front of her like this could take a minute. But all he said was, “Cops suck. And you don’t.”
“Well, I’m flattered all to hell.”
“I’m not trying to flatter you. I thought since we both had our issues with, uh, management, we might occupy common ground. Philosophically.” He pointed to the folder on the table. That precious report of his. “I gave you that,” he said, “because I wanted you to understand the underpinnings of what I’m doing.”
“The underpinnings of working for the cartels.”
“I don’t work for them. I underwrite black-market enterprises. Their businesses. Their operations.”
“Underwrite? So you sell insurance to criminals?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“And this is a good thing because . . .”
He sighed. Winced a bit at the headache or the conversation or both. Maybe trying to make her feel stupid.
“I’m serious. In what universe is this okay?”
“I was trying to explain last night. The origin of all of this was the program we ran in Afghanistan—”
“I don’t want to hear about Afghanistan. You were gonna take my informant back to the cartel.”
“Just listen. What we learned in Afghanistan was that a small force—ten, twenty very highly skilled operators—could bring order to the heroin trade. Granted, the original mission was simply to enlist their help in stopping al-Qaeda, but we realized that stabilizing the poppy market actually led to all sorts of tangible dividends. Economic stability. Prosperity. Peace. Sure, whatever, we were helping ‘criminals’ secure their product. Mitigate their rivals. Evade interdiction. But when they had insurance, when they stopped worrying about that cartel shit, they started to behave like rational actors. Like regular business owners, even. Suddenly schools are going up, bridges, all that nation-building shit that State and the NGOs love congratulating themselves for. It turns out, a black market is very easy to stabilize—”
“And you’re telling me that the CIA is doing that here in Mexico?”
“You fucking kidding? Of course not.”
“Of course not?”
“They shuttered the program.”
“Why?”
“Ultimately? The CIA doesn’t want to be in the business of ending the drug war. Neither does the DEA or the FBI or the Justice Department. They want to keep it going forever.”
“But you’re doing it. Here. In Mexico.”
“I took the idea to the private sector. Started an insurance business, essentially. Something goes sideways, the cartel is insured, and that means they don’t need to shoot up the plaza or kill cops. We give ’em a piece of the rock, so they can do business in peace.”
“We,” she said, realizing what he meant. Who he meant. “That man at the hotel, those soldiers in the alley, they’re not CIA or—”
“No, they’re like me, most of them off-book too. Ex-military, intelligence, even a couple gangsters, guys from all over the world. Some of them moonlight in private security, different agencies. It takes a particular kind of expertise, ‘selling insurance to criminals.’ Figuring premiums, investigating claims—like with Gustavo. He essentially stole millions of investment dollars from the Golfos. The Concern is gonna do everything it can to avoid having to pay out a claim like that.”
“The Concern?”
“Sorry, that’s what we’re called. It was the name of Shipley’s program.”
She suddenly remembered Gustavo’s coked-up rant. Going off about globalistas and bankers. “El Problema,” she said.
“Yeah, it got lost in translation down here. Should be more like La Empresa. The Concern—like a business. I mean, shit, we’re not the problem, we’re the solution.”
“To what?”
He sighed, rubbed his eyes.
“The bloodshed, the chaos. The cartels can’t call the cops when their shipments get ganked. They can’t sue anyone. The only measure they have is blood. But it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s what we showed in Afghanistan. It’s not the average Mexican’s fault that America has a bottomless appetite for narcotics. Stabilizing the black market is the moral thing for us to do.” He looked to see how that landed with her. “Look, if you don’t see it, you don’t see it. Maybe deep down, you are a cop. A lot of people live for the drug war—not just cops, but lawyers, judges, prisons. Millions of people making their living on the violence and chaos, none of them in cartels.”
He stopped, as though he could sense he’d begun insulting her, shook his head in a way that seemed like he didn’t want to make it worse. Then he tilted his head like he was getting some advice from the ceiling.
“Look,” he said at last. “For someone in such deep shit at work all the time, ask yourself this: why do you stay inside a system you constantly have to game?”
He didn’t ask it like he expected an answer. He stood to go.
But she had a question.
“Are you gonna take me to the Golfos?”
“What?” His shock seemed genuine. “For fucksake, no.”
“I’m the only one who knows where the tunnel is,” she said, searching his face for the least hint of deception. “You’re telling me this . . . Concern is gonna cover their millions of lost investment?”
He didn’t even stop shaking his head no.
“The Golfos violated the terms of the policy,” he said. “They sent their own guys after Gustavo and completely jacked the whole thing. We don’t do business with shitty partners. I’m not taking you anywhere but America. I know I talk shit about cops, but a dead DEA agent is unacceptable.”
He wasn’t looking at her, and then suddenly he was. She felt something big coming, she wasn’t sure what.
“Especially if you’re that agent,” he said.
“Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked.
“It’s not,” she said.
He smiled.
“We’re hiring, Diane.”
He left.
She counted to one hundred and twenty and then bounded across the room and picked up the sack, pulled open the magnetic seal, half expecting it to be empty, but her phone was right there. She extracted it, turned it on. A few moments acquiring a signal. Messages. Bronwyn (2). Childs (7).
She dialed Childs and put the phone to her ear. She listened to it ring and looked out the window at the wired rooftops sewing the pale white sky with a thin skein of black thread. She realized just before he picked up that she didn’t want him to, that she wasn’t ready to talk to him, but it was too late to hang up.
“Jesus, Diane.”
“Childs,” she said softly.
“Where are you?”
“Monterrey.”
“California?”
“Mexico. Some apartment.”
“Fuck. Why? Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Cromer says the Mexican police are looking for you? That that American who called you was killed? Firefights, civilian casualties, what the hell is going on down there?”
She didn’t know how to explain, what to explain. She just needed to get off the phone. She never should have called.
“It’s okay, it’s just complicated.”
“Complicated? The hell does that mean? Look, you gotta get out of Mexico. The State Department’s been all up in Cromer’s ass, Cromer’s been chewing out Dufresne, Dufresne’s been taking it out on his liver, asking if you ever told me about you two’s time in Sacramento. They’ve got the transcripts of Oscar’s texts, I know that. OPR’s grilled me about you. About Oscar. And now whatever you’re doing in Monterrey . . .”
She absorbed this intelligence as if it were some other Diane he was talking about. She didn’t feel like she was in any kind of shock, but there was something dissociative inherent in this conversation. It was like hearing a recording of the wiretap, like she was calling from an alternate timeline. So much had transpired.
“Are you listening to me?”
She hadn’t been, not really. She was thinking that calling Childs felt like flipping a coin. How you’d sometimes flip tails, and realize you wanted heads all along. How calling him now was like that, was in fact an act of making up her mind. Of realizing that her mind was already made up, that she didn’t want or need anything from him, from Dufresne, the team, the DEA, Los Angeles.
“Look, I’ll come down—”
“No!” she barked. Then calmly, “Don’t.”
“Diane. This is deep shit.”
In deep shit all the time. Gaming the system.
“I know I encouraged you to go, but Dufresne’s right. We gotta stay in our lane—”
“I gotta go, Childs.”
“It better be to an airport. Or a lawyer.”
“Just . . . forget I called.”
“Goddamnit, I’m your partner, Diane. Just tell me where you are, and—”
“You need to forget I called. Those transcripts aren’t gonna look good, Russ,” she said. “I let Oscar get close to me.”
A middling silence. Him pondering what that could mean.
“I don’t care—”
“It’s not just Oscar,” she said. “They’re gonna look hard at you, Russ. Because of me. I’m sorry. And they’re gonna look hard at Dufresne especially. And they’re gonna find things from Sacramento. You need to listen to me on this.”
“Diane.”
“Really, forget I called,” she said. And then she hung up, turned off the phone, and put it back in the bag.
Even what things Carver possessed here withheld. A fridge racked out with bottled water. A rusted metal medicine cabinet possessed exactly five items: an old-fashioned razor, Feather blades, a toothbrush, Colgate toothpaste, and a black comb. A bar of white soap in the shower. A diminished brick of them under the cabinet. She imagined these bars had been around the world with him. He had Fruit of the Loom T-shirts. Levi’s. She already knew he wore boxer briefs. Mostly white socks. A few white dress shirts of Mexican manufacture. A pair of black loafers that looked worn exactly once. She was dying to know for what function these and the black slacks and suit coat were deployed.
She looked in the envelope he’d gotten at the hotel. At the fake passports in there. One without a picture, for a someone named Bethany Wells. She was jealous for a moment, and then her heart sang when she realized it was meant for her.
She filled the clawfoot tub and fell into a nap on a towel folded over the lip behind her. She’d brought in the tote and used the stranger’s Lady Bic to shave and tried on the stranger’s sundress and combed her hair with Carver’s comb.
She peeled a mango with a knife and ate it with half a sweet roll and then drank cooled-to-lukewarm coffee at the window, watching nimble old men play soccer on the court outside. The day’s fullness quaking the air over the court like an oven. She wondered how many miles they ran in that lot. She wondered when she would run again, and what else would happen, what events she would put in motion. How many things that mattered she would do.
He came in with a new set of keys and migraine both. He fell onto the couch with his arm over his face, so she didn’t tell him that she’d used her phone. She eventually decided to never tell him by putting the bag back where it had been. A lie of omission. This would matter later, but for now she thought he wasn’t the only one who could withhold now, was he? She was struggling with what she knew she wanted, with the fact that he’d noticed the dress and had maybe stifled a comment on it, and what all that noticing and reticence could mean.
She went and lay down on the bed in the bedroom and waited him out. She was tired too, but she couldn’t sleep—she’d had too much or there was too much to make up or it was too hot. She turned on the large fan up in the high ceiling and watched it turn more than felt it.
He startled her with his voice in the doorway.
“What?”
“I said are you hungry?”
It had gotten on to evening. Time had some bend and flex to it.
“I could eat.”
She noticed his new pants as they waited for the boy he’d called up from an apartment downstairs to bring their dinner. An entire chicken in a plastic bag. The boy left and came back with a tureen of pozole. He departed again, and returned with ribboned cabbage in a sack with vinegar and salt. A baggie of limes. The kid reappeared a final time with another bag of beers in ice, and Carver gave him a lot of money as she finished setting a table that was scored and nearly as thick as a butcher block. They ate the chicken with their hands and ate the pozole from large cups with huge spoons for the cabbage too.
He told her more about his grandfather when she asked, a runner of moonshine everyone called “Shakey” who completed his life building alcohol funny cars. Knuckles busted from wrenching up his shit. Said the seizures were a family curse going back to Ireland. Maybe, who knows? Whether so or not, the foreknowledge made his first one less an event than it would have been otherwise. A thing you could hide if you knew what it was.
They took fresh beers to the rough couch, and she told him about her father. Practicing pool left-handed so he could one day run a stupid switcheroo. Doing this practice right up to his last week alive. Never won out, but still. The man was committed to the long game. His great enemy in life whatever was on the up-and-up. Taxes, girlfriends, umpires.
Their talk wound down. He said he’d take her to the States, they just needed to get a picture for a passport he already had for her, she could fly out of Monterrey or they could drive to the border. He realized he was just dragging her into some crazy shit. She ran her finger over the lip of her beer, trying to get the smell of him, leaning a little into his air space.
When she told him where the tunnel was, the disordered expression on his face was a fresh heaven. She climbed onto him. Feeling him beneath her, pressing herself into him, that almost did a trick on her right there, right away. She undid him and got him inside of her. She ruined her knees on that rough cauliflower couch, could feel the air on her fresh abrasions. She’d have postage-stamp scars on each for a very long time.
BAGRAM AFB, PARWAN PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN | |
MARCH 19, 2004, 21:47 | |
POLYGRAPHER: |
There were rumors, correct? The DEA’s Karachi office had heard things about the Ground Branch and heroin trafficking. |
CARVER: |
It came up. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
What was Shipley’s line on that? |
CARVER: |
That it was utter bullshit. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
So he lied to the DEA? Carver? |
CARVER: |
Oh, is that a real question? Of course he did. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
So what happened when DEA heard from their informants on the matter? |
CARVER: |
I don’t know that they ever did. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
Right. Because their informants in Paktika were killed. But it didn’t take long for the Karachi office to figure out who exposed them. |
CARVER: |
Like you said, there were rumors. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
It’s not a rumor if it’s true. |
CARVER: |
No, everything’s a rumor without proof. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
The special agent in charge in Karachi says all his guys in Abdul Kalali’s operation died or went missing after you learned their identities. He says you personally were very persistent in getting those names. |
CARVER: |
We closed more of their cases in three months than they did in five years. We gave them actionable intelligence. Guys they wanted for years, we brought in hog-tied and ready to process. They fucking owed us. We helped them do their job, they could help us do ours. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
Which was? |
CARVER: |
It wasn’t fighting the endless drug war, I’ll tell you that much. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
Seriously, I’d like you to tell me: what work were you doing? |
CARVER: |
Rooting out al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Stabilizing Paktika. Bringing peace and prosperity to the region. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
You sound like a believer. |
CARVER: |
In what? |
POLYGRAPHER: |
The Concern. |
CARVER: |
The Concern? Christ, I already told you. Shipley never said a word about any Special Activities Division projects. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
Shipley wasn’t supposed to deploy the pursuit teams for the kinds of things you were doing. |
CARVER: |
You say this like I put Shipley in charge. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
I say this like Shipley was going against orders. Did he tell you about the little report he slipped into Tenet’s office? |
CARVER: |
No. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
The one outlining your pursuit team’s work in particular? The one arguing for the deceptive misallocation of military and law enforcement assets— |
CARVER: |
Can you take no for an answer? Look at the needle. Am I lying? Am I fucking lying? I didn’t know about any program. Christ. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
One last question: what did you personally, ethically, think about deceiving the US military? How did you feel, thwarting the work of the DEA to put millions of dollars into the pockets of a heroin operation? |
CARVER: |
Are you asking did I sleep like a baby? |
POLYGRAPHER: |
I’m asking, did you sleep like a baby because you were getting rich? How much did you and Shipley and the Ground Branch get? |
CARVER: |
The only money I ever made was my government salary. Look at the needle. Did it move? |