Damage Control (29 page)

On cue, Hernandez shot out his hand to grab her wrist. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Maria whirled on him and slapped his face. “How dare you!” she said. Tears clouded her vision.

Hernandez shot to his feet, too, his face red with rage.

“Go ahead!” Maria dared. “Go ahead and beat me. Have me shot. If you think so little of me—if you think for even a second that I could betray you—by all means shoot me yourself.” She pulled her arm from his hand. “Bastard.”

Her heart hammered at an impossible rate as she headed again for the door.

“Stop!” he commanded.

When she turned this time, he hadn’t moved. He still stood in front of the love seat, his face slack with surprise.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Maria said, pointing her finger at him. “I am not like your other mistresses. Yes, I know you have them. They pretend to care for you because they fear you. I
love
you, Felix. I would lay down my life for you. How dare you suspect me of such a despicable thing?”

He moved toward her. “Where are you going?” His voice was softer now.

“Home,” she said.

He reached for her hands with both of his, but stopped when she recoiled. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was being ...
stupid
. Please stay. Please stay the night.”

“I am going
home
,” Maria said again. “Unless, of course, you want to have your guards drag me back here so that you can rape me.”

The thought seemed to horrify him. “Maria. I would never—”

“And neither would I,” she said. “Never in a million years would I betray you.”

“Stay, then.”

She shook her head emphatically. “No, not tonight. I couldn’t tonight. I need to be alone tonight.”

Hernandez seemed to be at a loss for words, as if he hadn’t found himself in this position before.

“Will you be back tomorrow?” His voice sounded oddly childlike now.

This was a new expression. There was tenderness there somewhere.

She might actually feel something after she drove a stake through the monster’s heart.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
FOUR

T
wo hours ago, when Ernesto Palma had taken the phone call from Felix Hernandez, he’d thought for certain that the point of the call would be to upbraid him for having lost track of his prey. Palma had spent so much time over the years dealing with the peasants and riffraff that defined the population of drug thugs that he continued to be surprised by the savvy and resourcefulness of Harris and Lerner.

It only made sense, of course, that they would disappear after their altercation with the patrol in the jungle. Once they’d been made, they had to go into hiding. That was the bad news. The flip side of that—the good news—was that hiding and getting away were mutually exclusive endeavors. Sooner or later, they would have to make a move, and when they did, Palma would be ready for them. The longer they took, in fact, the more soldiers and police Palma could have out on the streets to intercept them.

He’d talked himself into believing that his prey’s disappearance was actually a good thing because it allowed him to marshal more resources to catch them.

But that had turned out to be a fantasy.

Four hours ago, one of his patrols had found the Pathfinder stashed off the road. It had been stripped of all valuable gear, and there was no evidence of what direction they might have gone when they left.

Had they hijacked a car? Had they taken off on foot? That latter option seemed least likely if they were in fact trying to head north—a lot of inhospitable desert lay between here and there—but maybe they’d reached some kind of a hybrid solution, in which they hiked far enough to steal a different car.

For that matter, they had three million American dollars with them. They could buy any car they wanted. They could buy dozens of any car they wanted.

This was the report that Palma had been prepared to give to Felix Hernandez when the phone rang, but as it turned out, he never had to. In fact, Hernandez never even asked him about how the search was going. He didn’t say much of anything. He opened with, “My plane will be waiting for you at Hacienda Luna. Be on it in a half hour.”

Palma ran the distance in his head. “I don’t think that’s possible, Mr. Hernandez.”

“Make it possible, Captain Palma. Your targets will be leaving from Ciudad Juárez.”

“Ciudad
Juárez
? That’s twelve hundred kilometers. How are they getting there?”

“I don’t know,” Hernandez replied. “But when they get here, I want you here waiting for them. You cannot let them leave.”

Palma didn’t like it. “With all respect, Mr. Hernandez, we have them on the run here. They’ve left their vehicle and now they’re having to improvise on the run. Literally on the run. They are on foot, as far as we know.”

“Which means that they could be in a boat, as far as you know. Do yourself a favor and don’t leave my pilot waiting.”

With that, Hernandez clicked off.

Thus, Palma found himself racing down roads that were never intended for speed, bouncing off the door and roof of the Sandcat as Sergeant Nazario did everything he could to keep it on the road.

As he’d expected, thirty minutes had proven to be undoable, but forty-five looked to be possible.

“We are going to hurry to Ciudad Juárez,” Nazario said. “We are leaving all our leads behind us. And then what happens when we arrive there?”

“We await orders,” Palma said.

In the lingering daylight, Maria stormed from the compound, every stride covering half again the distance that it normally would. The guards she passed looked startled—some even shifted their hands on their weapons—but none made a threatening move on her.

The fact that her heart did not explode in her chest was testament to the fact that she’d taken good care of herself all these years. She left the house through the front doors and never slowed as she approached the wall. Sensing her ire, the guards moved quickly to open the heavy gates to let her pass without slowing.

Maria felt proud of herself for pulling this off, even as she managed the swell of terror in her gut that her confidence had been betrayed. Her FBI contact had sworn on all things holy that her identity would be protected. Without that assurance, she never would have offered up all the information she had these past two years.

Veronica Costanza had always seemed like a straight shooter to her. They’d first met at a coffee shop while standing in line. Both of them favored cold coffee drinks to hot ones, and that had led to a lighthearted discussion of caffeinated drinks. Looking back on it, Maria realized that the chance meeting had been engineered from the beginning, but that knowledge didn’t tarnish the reality that she liked and trusted Veronica.

Even now that Maria knew that she’d been betrayed, she couldn’t wrap her head around the notion that Veronica might have done it. Still, what was done was done. Now she had to cope. While Felix might have been taken off guard by her bluff back at the hacienda, his intelligence network would continue to push for details that would ultimately lead them to her. If not tonight or tomorrow, then next week or next month.

As she climbed into her Toyota Celica and turned the key, her mind raced to find the way out of this. There had to be a way. There was
always
a way.

As she drove down the streets of Ciudad Juárez, she checked her mirrors frequently, fully expecting to find a machine-gun-bearing technical closing in on her from behind. Such had been the fate of countless others whom Felix had suspected of betrayal. Yet none appeared.

Could it be that her performance had truly been that convincing? Could it be that he actually believed that she loved him? Maybe so. Why else would he have confided so much in her?

Still, his perceptions were at best a ruse. Soon he would learn the truth, and when he did, Maria’s life would be measured in units of agony.

She could never go back, that much was clear. But how was she supposed to make her way out of the country? What were her options? She’d never discussed these things with Veronica. The plan had always been to endure—to wait until the FBI said that it was safe for her to enter the United States. Even as she heard the words the first time they’d been spoken, she’d realized their true meaning to be,
after she had provided adequate information to the United States,
but that was okay. No favors in the world came free.

She didn’t understand what had changed. Only three days ago, she’d met with Veronica, begging her to bring her in, but as of then, the FBI wasn’t quite finished with her. Maria had even offered up new intelligence on the location of smuggling tunnels, yet Veronica had remained unmoved.

What could possibly have reordered the world to such a large degree? If Felix’s intelligence was right—and Felix’s intel was
always
right—Veronica would have no choice but to get her out of the country. Surely, she wouldn’t let Maria just die at Felix’s hand.

Unless there was a second informant. Was that even possible?

Of course it was possible. There was no level of betrayal that was impossible within the American intelligence community. But was it
reasonable
?

Why not? If Veronica Costanza had engineered an excuse to meet with Maria, could she not have created the same opportunity for all of Felix’s mistresses? Could she not have created it for dozens of people who worked for him?

As she pulled onto the main road leaving the compound, Maria shook these thoughts out of her mind. They were silly. Veronica would have told her if there were additional agents within Felix’s compound. To deny that kind of information would be to impose that much more danger on her, and Veronica wouldn’t have done that.

The fact remained that Maria and Maria alone had lost both parents and a brother to Felix’s brutality, and she alone had worked for five years to infiltrate his network for the express purpose of bringing him down.

She
had
to be the one that Felix had been talking about in his rant. She
had
to be. She didn’t know that she could live with the knowledge that it was otherwise. When he ultimately faced his punishment, she
needed
for her hands to be on the chain of evidence and testimony that put him away. In a perfect world, they would be on the apparatus that executed him in prison, but Veronica had prepared her for the fact that execution was unlikely.

She’d prepared her, in fact, for the likelihood that Felix would testify his way to a criminal charge that was barely a criminal charge. Instead, he would give up the American coconspirators who underwrote his criminal activities in return for little or no jail time. That, Veronica had warned her, was the state of panic that existed within the administration in Washington. They were willing to let murderers go free in return for information that would allow them to imprison disloyal bureaucrats.

Maria was a creature of habit. She followed the same route to and from the office every day. For starters, she felt entirely safe doing so—Felix’s enemies knew the faces and names of all of his mistresses, and there was no quicker route to the morgue than to lay a hand on one of them—but also, Maria needed to look for a sign from Veronica that she wanted to meet.

As she drove past the post box at the corner of Chelsea Street and Frutas Avenue, her heart fell. If they were to meet outside the pharmacy in the 2700 block of Santa Anna Boulevard, there would be a chalk mark on the paint—an X if the meeting was to happen tonight, and a heart if it was to happen tomorrow night. The box was in fact the flat green that it normally was.

She drove toward the Church of St. Michael the Archangel, hoping to see a bicycle chain on the wrought-iron fence out front. A silver chain would have had them meet in lobby of the Omniplex Theater for the nine o’clock show tonight, a black one for the same show tomorrow. Maria cursed under her breath as she saw no chain at all.

How could this be? If her cover had been blown this badly, surely Veronica would know about it. And if she knew about it, surely she would want to arrange a meeting.

A chill crawled up her spine as she considered the alternative: that the FBI was unaware that they had their own informant in their midst. That could be a disaster.

Maria resolved that when she got back to her house, she would post on Facebook that her tooth was hurting today. That was the signal for Veronica to make contact as soon as possible.

While she would never reenter Felix Hernandez’s world, she could pretend to be sick tomorrow as the details worked themselves out. Her absence would undoubtedly raise Felix’s suspicions, but there again Maria’s histrionics at the hacienda might serve her well. If she failed to show up, maybe Felix would merely assume that she was angry.

Maria lived in the Campestre neighborhood, once a lovely place where as a child she never would have dreamed she could afford to live. Now, the drug violence had driven most of the decent people away. Many had just abandoned their homes and their businesses, leaving the streets to the warriors. More than a few of the side streets had been completely blocked off with stacks of boulders in an effort to dissuade kidnappers and extortionists from gaining access to their enclaves.

Her heart raced as she pulled to the curb in front of her house. She slapped the transmission into neutral, set the brake, and hurried out of her seat. She made no effort to lock the car because locked doors just made the thieves break windows. Let them explore her ashtrays and the center console. If they found a few pesos, let them have them. Anything to take the edge off those poor wretches’ misery.

Please, God,
she prayed silently,
deliver me from this place soon. Please make it end.

Even in the diminishing light, the heat remained oppressive as she scurried across her yard toward the front door. On Felix’s suggestion, she’d long ago taken out all the shrubbery from around the single-story structure, in theory eliminating places for attackers to lie in wait.