Prologue
Ray Calabrese looked up from his BlackBerry to see Daria Gibron stride into the Rodeo Drive wine bar in Lycra exercise togs and sneakers, her hair slicked back, sans makeup.
It wasn’t the part of Los Angeles that many people tried to carry off the I’m-just-back-from-kickboxing look. She used her fingertips to brush still-damp black hair behind her ears. Her togs were two-piece, skintight, abdomen-baring, and black with red piping. She either had been working out or had joined the Justice League of America; Ray couldn’t tell at a glance.
She poured herself into the opposite chair. “Hallo, Ray.”
Ray smiled across the table at her. “I thought we were meeting after your appointment with that Portuguese importer.”
Daria took a sip of Ray’s wine and held it on her tongue before swallowing. “Not bad.”
“Montepulciano. The business guy was a no-show?”
“He had to cut and run.”
Ray had been digging into the investor’s background from his headquarters, the L.A. Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “I’m a little glad. If I were you, I wouldn’t reschedule that meeting. That guy? I think he’s trouble.”
Daria Gibron said, “Me, too.”
* * *
Four hours earlier …
The commission came out of the blue. A fledgling Portuguese import firm needed a translator who spoke Arabic and German. It was a relatively uncommon combination of languages for Los Angeles.
The Portuguese importer, João Patricio, had left a message on Daria’s smartphone in musical English. He offered three times her daily commission for two hours of work, provided she could come today. She thought about the other offers currently on the table. Two banks had her on standby for talks involving euro-zone debt (boring). One Hollywood production house needed her help to lure the latest young hunk from the French cinema (she’d seen his movies; they were both terribly important and terrible). There was some petroleum deal that sounded far worse than dull but the negotiations would take place on a yacht off an exclusive resort in Costa Rica (that one at least showed merit).
The Portuguese deal, though, was one afternoon. And while the work itself might be awful, the new winter lineup of Christian Louboutin’s had arrived, and the importer’s timing couldn’t be faulted.
From her condo in West Hollywood, Daria booted up her computer and checked out Senhor Patricio’s bona fides. He owned Iberian Exportações of Lisbon. She checked its history, its holdings, and found very little of interest. She called her FBI handler, Ray Calabrese. He agreed to check out the firm and to meet her at a favorite Tuscan wine bar later that evening.
She went online and checked in with one of her contacts at the Drug Enforcement Administration. The woman was famous for her uncanny ability to track down European sources on both sides of the law. Daria e-flirted with her a bit, then logged off and contacted some of her favorite European thieves, a man called Diego, with whom she had conducted business over the years. She flirted with them a bit, too.
Nobody had any hard information for her. Which, in and of itself, was okay. As far as it goes.
The Portuguese commission was a stroke of good fortune. Daria was wary of good fortune. Always.
* * *
Senhor Patricio was working out of a second-story office in a run-down, three-story building near LAX. It would be optimistic to say the neighborhood had seen better days; it probably hadn’t.
Daria’s used beige Honda Civic, which she had bought for cash, fit in nicely in the near-empty parking lot. When it came to cars, Daria usually opted for bland over speed. And she had never owned a car that kept its Vehicle Identification Number for longer than an hour.
Daria herself stood out quite a bit more than her car. She was a compact, athletic woman, five-six, with a heart-shaped face. She was dressed a bit risqué for a late-afternoon business meeting: black skirt just a tad too short, stilettos a tad too tall, crimson blouse showing a hint of her midnight blue bra, over which she wore a light, fitted jacket. It might be November, but it was still seventy in Los Angeles.
She checked her phone and found a text from her friend at the DEA. It read, simply: POI JUAREZ.
She tried calling back and got voice mail.
She tossed the strap of her leather handbag over her shoulder and took the stairs up to the second floor. João Patricio was waiting for her in the hallway. He was a small, sparse man with slicked-back gray hair and a tightly trimmed goatee. She subconsciously clocked his suit as off-the-rack, something of the genus buy-one-get-one-free. He shook Daria’s right hand, his left hand cradling her right elbow.
“You found us all right, Miss Gibron? I didn’t know from where you were coming. Everything in California is farther away than I imagine.”
The building was one of Los Angeles’s small-business incubators, renting office space for small- to medium-sized start-ups, rates by the month or year. They stood in the corridor, the maroon carpet freshly cleaned and smelling of ammonia. One door had been propped open a few inches to the right of the stairwell, she noted, but another hung almost fully open to the left of the stairs. A temporary, peel-off sign on the door read IBERIAN EXPORTACOES. Apparently, the maintenance company’s printer hadn’t been able to navigate the ç or the õ.
Patricio stood close to her, still holding her hand and elbow. His eyes darted quickly around the hall, as if worried about business competitors. Or a wife.
“Your English is quite good,” Daria noted. “So my lack of Portuguese won’t be a problem?”
“No. My lack of Arabic and French is the problem.” He shrugged disparagingly and gently nudged her in the direction of the fully open door. “May I discuss the details with you?”
Daria smiled and pivoted gracefully on her tall heels.
As she turned, Daria caught a fleeting glimpse of motion from the second, slightly ajar door on the far side of the stairwell. She also noted three important details.
First, the rented office had been retrofitted with a Leveque Works magnetic card reader that articulated three thick steel bolts built into the door frame. The fresh wood shavings on the carpet meant the card reader was newly installed. It was not your standard security setup for a rental building near the airport.
Second, she discerned the telltale tightness, horizontally, beneath João Patricio’s cotton shirt and striped tie. He wore a bulletproof vest.
Third, she noted that Iberian Exportações occupied a one-room office, not a suite. The door was wedged between the west-facing window and the stairwell.
Combine those three facts with the text from the DEA that labeled Patricio as a POI—Person of Interest—in the Juarez drug cartel, and the elements started to coalesce. Daria had had a run-in with the Baja cartel three months earlier, which had resulted in the most unfortunate death of a pillar of the drug-running community.
Still, Person of Interest isn’t a conclusive statement, Daria thought to herself. She had been a person of interest in several crimes on three continents. Some of which hadn’t been her fault at all.
What finally made Daria casually reach for the blade in her purse was Patricio’s self-deprecating joke about his poor Arabic and French.
The contract was for a translator fluent in Arabic and German.
Patricio wasn’t a businessman. He was an actor who had muffed his lines.
* * *
As soon as the Portuguese asshole led the curvy, black-haired Jewess into the office, Guerrón and Banguera emerged from the slightly open door to the right of the stairs. The narcotraficantes sprinted silently into position.
Guerrón, the whip-thin Ecuadorian, wore his trademark, checked keffiyeh headscarf, which hung to the middle of his back. The only thing the Americans feared more than the narco cartels was al Qaida, and Guerrón had taken to wearing the Yasser Arafat–style headdress just to head-fuck the DEA.
He checked the stairwell while Banguera, a steroid-enhanced Sinaloan in a wifebeater, checked the second-story window overlooking the parking lot. Both carried waterproof canvas satchels.
There was a one-in-four chance that this was the puta who tracked down and killed Carlos “the War Dog” Ramos in a bordello in Amsterdam. Gibron was one of four female contractors known to be working with Western, antinarcotics agencies at the time. The other three were being interrogated by teams in Miami, London, and Stockholm.
The soldiers checked the stairs and the parking lot. There was no sign of anyone else. The woman was alone.
They could do with her as they pleased.
* * *
Daria’s small knife was old and well used. It had been a gift from the only person in the world she truly called family. It had been given to her before she was a translator. Before she was an FBI asset and an expatriated immigrant marooned in America. Even before her time in Israeli intelligence.
He’d given it to her on the very day she had been adopted into the battle for the Middle East. Daria was probably nine years old at the time.
The sheath was leather, caramel brown and shaped like the playing card, a spade, but with the upper portion rounded. The leather had grown shiny and supple from years of being touched in alleys and bars and battlefields, in boardrooms and bedrooms. The sheath was approximately the size of Daria’s palm and Daria’s hands were not large.
The blade, once steel, had been replaced many times and now was a hardened plastic with a serrated edge. It was tough enough to slice through cowhide, if used properly.
Daria could use it properly.
* * *
Think of it as a waltz.
Daria, her right hand and elbow held by the small Portuguese businessman. Her left hand sliding into the unseen pocket slit in the bottom of her shoulder bag (like all of her bags).
João Patricio steps to his left, smiling nervously behind his silvery goatee.
Daria steps to her right and, her weight on one foot, deftly kicks the door closed with the other.
Patricio blinks in surprise when the door shuts and he hears the ca-clack of the steel bolts deploying into the door. That wasn’t part of the plan.
* * *
In the corridor, Guerrón and Banguera moved to the door of the rental office. As they stepped toward the door, it swung shut.
Ca-clack.
The new magnetic card reader and attached steel bolt security system had been installed to ensure privacy when they interrogated the Judía bitch. But the door had shut and the lock deployed too early.
The men exchanged perplexed glances.
* * *
Daria and Patricio were still moving, face-to-face, and turning. Patricio looked a bit surprised. Daria smiled languidly.
She gripped his right hand fiercely and stepped farther to his right, twisting his arm as she moved. Before he was aware of it, she slid behind him, pulled up his arm, and twisted painfully. His shoulder popped out of its socket and lights flashed before his eyes.
Daria raised her left forearm and drove it into the base of his skull, slamming his forehead into the door.
His vision blurred and his knees buckled. Daria held him aloft against the door and raised his dislocated right arm higher.
Her thumb flicked the plastic blade from its sheath. She slid the serrated edge the length of Patricio’s right arm, from the heel of his hand as far up the inside of his arm as his suit coat allowed.
The skin split easily. Warm blood roiled from the long, surgically clean wound.
Daria held the gushing right wrist over Patricio’s left shoulder, and directly over the card reader.
A Leveque system can be short-circuited easily enough. Water worked fine, as would wine, but really, any liquid would suffice.
João Patricio moaned as his blood gushed into the magnetic card reader. Daria smelled smoke rising from the short-circuited locking mechanism.
Time to see what would happen next. The one-room office, between the stairwell and the outside wall, was too small for an ambush from within. That left her free to ignore any potential threats within the room.
Daria used her strength, weight, and training to pin the half-conscious importer between herself and the door.
* * *
Guerrón and Banguera waited a handful of seconds for the Portuguese businessman to unbolt the door from the inside. Doing this favor for the cartel was erasing a very large debt Patricio owed.
Nothing happened. The soldiers thought they heard a thump from inside the room.
Banguera, his absurdly muscle-bound upper body gleaming in sweat, reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a magnetic card. He swiped the card through the lock and awaited the ca-clank.
Nothing.
The LED light on the card reader flickered red. There was a strange hiss from the locking mechanism.
The Sinaloan soldier swiped the card again.
Another hiss. This time, they didn’t even get the red LED. Nothing.
Guerrón brushed his checkered keffiyeh behind his back, set down his waterproof satchel, pulled out a Heckler & Koch MP 5 machine pistol. He slapped home a banana clip. He waved his friend out of the way, and thumbed off the safety.
He stepped in front of the cheap wooden door and kept the sound-suppressed MP-5 on single fire. He tossed seven .9-mm. slugs into the door.
The bullets cut a perfect half circle in the door, surrounding the steel bars in the locking mechanism.
The gunmen heard a grunt through the perforated door.
* * *
Wearing a Kevlar vest is good but Daria knew, from painful experience, that standing behind the person wearing one is better.
The door took the first impact. The front of the vest took much of the rest. Patricio’s body absorbed the hydrostatic shock. The back of his vest dampened the remainder of the impact.
Daria took very little.
She felt around his waist for a gun and found nothing. She found a puny, five-shot, chrome .22 with an ivory handle strapped to one ankle. It was, as her old gunnery sergeant would have said, a complete piece of drek. She imagined firing such a weapon at plastic ducks to win a stuffed animal. But beggars and choosers, she thought. She pulled the little gun and shot Patricio in the left knee.
Patricio cried out in agony. He dropped to his knees and Daria dropped with him, still pinning him against the door.
“How many?”
Patricio began chanting in Portuguese.
Daria cocked the little .22 and placed it against his left elbow. She whispered in his ear, as a lover might. “Senhor.… my fee … is going … up.”
“Two! Two! Please, God, please.”
“Two total?”
“Two in the hall! Two in the hall! There’s a van in the alley, a fat man! Waiting! Please, by all that’s holy!”
He had lost quite a bit of blood by now. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be of use.
João Patricio’s head lolled to one side, revealing two of the seven splintered holes evenly spaced in a half circle in the wooden door. Daria stuck the barrel of the pip-squeak .22 into one of the larger holes and fired once.
* * *
Guerrón smiled at the perfect half circle of bullet holes in the wood. He considered himself an artist with a gun. He stepped back, ready to kick it in, when they heard a second shot from within the room.
Guerrón took another step back. And another.
He looked down. Blood began seeping from his iliac artery, halfway between his left hip and his testicles.
* * *
Daria squinted through one of the other holes in the door. She saw a man’s legs stumble backward, saw a bloodstain blossom on his jeans.
One down.
Still on her knees behind the convulsing, bleeding-out importer, Daria took a moment to scan the office. One generic desk, three generic chairs on rollers with cheap but durable cloth seats and backrests. A window that looked out on gnarled, dyspeptic trunks, which is what passed for trees in L.A.
She rummaged through the dying man’s trouser pockets, leaning him up against the smashed door like the legion of cadavers at Fort Zinderneuf. She found a lighter—old, burnished, and brass—and a fat calfskin wallet. She opened it and found what she wanted: a thick wad of dollars and euros.
Perfect. Money can’t buy happiness. But it can buy time.
* * *
Banguera drew his own matching machine pistol, leather strap over his sloped shoulder. His eyes bulged as his partner stumbled back and fell on his ass against the far wall of the corridor. The ruptured artery in his groin was dampening his jeans with a fast-growing red stain. Guerrón began to twitch as his body went into shock. His H & K fell to the carpet by his side.
* * *
Daria left Patricio on his knees propped up against the door. She kicked off her stilettos and hitched up her already-short skirt to a decidedly unladylike level. She leaped up onto the cheap desk and used the lighter to ignite João Patricio’s stash of money. She held the burning end under the mandatory smoke detector that she had found in every room of every public building she had entered since defecting. I do so love American paranoia, she thought.
An earsplitting alarm sounded and the tiny, tin windmill beneath the ceiling-mounted spigot began to rotate, splashing water everywhere.
Daria dropped to the far side of the desk. Soaked to her skin, hair matted with water from the sprinkler, she stripped off her jacket—it was last season’s anyway.
It was her own damn fault. She shouldn’t have come to the meeting without a gun. Oh, well. Kill and learn.
She remembered a drill instructor from her Shin Bet days. Whatever can’t be used defensively, use offensively. The IKEA desk wouldn’t repel bullets but the cheaply made furniture was light enough to maneuver, and it rested on coasters so the office could be easily reconfigured for each new renter. She shoved the chairs out of the way and spun the desk anticlockwise so the short end faced the door.
She started shoving. Her bare feet struggled to find purchase in the soaked carpet, but the light, cheap desk on its concave coasters picked up speed.
João Patricio—kneeling against the door, barely conscious, right arm hanging limp and spooling out blood—half-turned to see the narrow edge of the desk only a meter from his face and moving fast. He screamed.
* * *
The alarm blared in the hall. Banguera felt the wheels fall off their well-crafted plan. He knelt to hoist up his friend as the busted door exploded off its hinges. He scrambled away as the door toppled like a felled tree, trapping Guerrón’s legs and drawing a howl of pain from the Ecuadorian. The Portuguese importer tumbled out into the hall, skull staved in, blood arcing in every direction. The fire alarm continued to shrill. Madre de Dios, Banguera thought, landing on his stomach, lo que el Diablo?
He shook his head to clear his thoughts. He felt his machine pistol dig into his side, the strap still around his shoulder.
He rolled over to free the gun but his eyes caught on a pair of bare feet standing on the felled door, which pressed down on Guerrón’s badly bleeding leg. Banguera’s eyes traveled upward from long, tapered legs, a short skirt, a soaked and translucent blouse, to a heart-shaped face.
Only then did he realize the figure was holding Guerrón’s sound-suppressed machine pistol.
* * *
There were only a handful of offices in the incubator building and the fire alarm was sufficient to drive the few employees out into the parking lot on an otherwise dull Monday afternoon. No one noticed the bedraggled, barefoot woman, soaked to the skin, carrying stilettos and a limp, wet jacket, who padded out through the fire door and climbed into a nondescript car. She put the car in reverse, maneuvered it around the building, and into the back alley lined with Dumpsters.
* * *
Doctor Hector Avila was no doctor. They just called him that because he enjoyed using surgical tools during interrogations.
He preferred to let dumb foot soldiers like Guerrón and Banguera subdue the subject before he got involved. That’s why he sat in the van, in the alley, smoking a hefty joint with the passenger-side window open, smoke billowing out. He wanted to be relaxed before beginning his bit. Breaking a person is not an amateur’s business. It took a calm, steady hand.
Hector Avila was lost in his thoughts about how to begin: fear first, then pain? Pain, then fear? Different patients required different remedies, the doctor knew.
An unremarkable beige compact backed into the alley and had come to rest a foot from the front bumper of the van. Avila squinted through blue smoke, as the driver’s door opened and someone climbed out.
Wonderful, he thought. A civilian. Just what he needed.
It was a girl, young, barefoot. Avila tried to wave away the smoke haze to get a better look at her. She circled around and padded up to his passenger-side window, a sodden jacket draped over her left forearm.
Avila leaned out to tell the puta to get the hell gone. She probably was a junkie seeking a handout. Or maybe one of his few, remaining spliffs. Before he could growl at the girl, she let the sodden jacket flutter to the concrete, revealing a Heckler & Koch with a silencer. She pointed it at his face.
“Good afternoon, sir.” Her Spanish was flawless with the flair of a Catalan accent. “Do you represent the Juarez cartel?”
Dr. Avila froze, eyes bulging.
“Sir?” The woman seemed ever so calm.
“I…” The fat man felt his asthma kick in.
“I thought so.” The girl looked both ways down the alley, then back at him. “Could you step out of the van, please?”
“W-wait…” He heard his voice crack. “I just follow orders. I do as—shit!”
The joint singed his finger and thumb. He dropped it. It hit the knit shirt stretched over his obese belly. His hands flapped, slapping it to the van floor.
The girl tapped his cheek with the sound-suppressing barrel to regain his attention.
Avila whimpered.
In his storied career as a torturer, Avila had heard many men whimper. He knew the sound and considered it a sure sign that a man was breaking. Now he heard himself and blushed.
“Tsk. You mustn’t feel embarrassed.” The girl sounded genuinely sensitive. And absolutely insane. “That’s how I reacted the first time I was shot. I was eleven years old. The second time … well, I suppose I was still eleven.” She shrugged. “It’s a difficult age.”
She opened the passenger door. She waited a beat.
Avila hefted his bulk out of the van.
She slid open the rear door of the van. In the back she spotted rope, handcuffs, a small culinary blowtorch, a car battery with two cables that ended in alligator clips, and his doctor’s bag.
“Get in, please. Facedown.”
The girl spoke as one does to a distraught child: soothingly. “I would like you to send a message to the Juarez cartel for me. Will you do that, sir?”
“Yes!” Avila’s heart skipped. This might not end with a bullet to his brain. “Yes. Of course. Yes. Anything.”
“Thank you, sir.”
She slid the door closed.
* * *
Once it was closed, Daria looked to her left and right again. No witnesses. She opened the gas cap of the van. She took Guerrón’s long, al-Qaida–style keffiyeh and stuffed the cotton scarf into the gas tank as far as it would fit. She waited a few seconds for it to absorb petrol, then used Patricio’s lighter on the tail end.
She moved back to the passenger window. “Thank you, sir.”
Lying on his belly, Doctor Avila gulped. “Miss? What … what is the message?”
Daria said, “You’ll see.”
She walked to her car, opened the trunk, and pulled out her gym bag. She climbed into the compact and pulled away.
* * *
About twenty minutes later, in an elegant Rodeo Drive wine bar, a waiter brought Daria Gibron a goblet of Montepulciano and professionally ignored her spandex attire and just-showered hair.
She sipped. “That’s lovely.”
“Nice.” To Ray Calabrese, all red wines tasted more or less alike. He played with his glass a moment, avoiding eye contact. “Look, I’m sorry to dump this on you but … I’m no longer your handler.”
Daria let a few beats of silence pass. “No?”
He looked up and approximated a smile. “The bureau decided. You’re a citizen. Your work for us, for the DEA, for ATF has … um … this seems crass, sorry. It’s bought you citizenship. You’ll ace the test. Then you’ll be an American. One of us. Congratulations.”
Daria sipped her wine. Ray seemed really proud. But also sad. In his own Ray Calabrese way, he seemed to be saying “hello” and “good-bye” at the same time.
Daria thought an appropriate response from a normal person might be something along the lines of, This is marvelous news! So she went with that.
“Okay! Well…” Ray lifted his glass.
Daria did, too. They toasted.
“All right then. Welcome to America, citizen. What’s next for you?”
Daria thought about the bled-out importer in the rundown office building, the bullet-riddled bodies of the narco soldiers, and the burnt husk of the fat man in the van. And she thought about the message she had just sent the Juarez cartel. Would they heed the warning?
No way to tell.
She mulled the offers for translation work that were on the table. She considered the job awaiting her in Costa Rica. “A vacation, I think.”
“Good for you,” Ray said. “You deserve a break.”
Daria thought long and hard about taking Ray to bed that night but, in the end, decided it was a bad idea. He was genuinely one of the good guys.
And she genuinely wasn’t.