The Savage Dead (4 page)

Her jail-breaking software completed the rest.

She watched as the display on her screen recorded the software's progress. One by one, the Unix-based limitations Apple had built into the phone began to crumble until at last her phone had total access to his iPhone's operating system. E-mail, calendars, text messages, notepads: everything opened for her inspection.

These Americans and their toys, she thought. Everything was here. His entire life, everything that mattered to him—and more important, to Senator Rachel Sutton—was right here for her to examine.

It was almost too easy.

When the process was complete, the software initiated an untethered jailbreak, and set up a worm that would migrate to his other Apple devices next time he synched them. From here on out, every update, every e-mail, every text would send a ghost copy to her device, giving her what the Americans so primly referred to as “the fly on the wall,” making his life, and hopefully that of Senator Rachel Sutton as well, an open book.

The program finished its run right as the shower stopped. Moving quickly, Pilar unplugged her adapter from his phone and put it back in his pocket.

She was a few feet from her purse, still wrapping the adapter around her finger when he stepped out of the shower, steam rising off his shoulders and a towel around his waist.

“Hey,” he said. He glanced at the adapter in her hands and cocked his head to one side. “What's that?”

For a moment, she thought how easy it would be to kill him. A single strike with the blade of her hand to his throat, just below his Adam's apple, and she could crush his windpipe. She could stand over him and watch as he choked and gasped away the last few seconds of his life. The whole pathetic display would be over in less than two minutes.

Unfortunately, as long as the senator was alive, and as long as he was her most trusted aide, Paul Godwin was worth more alive than dead. Far more, in fact.

Which meant this was a job for Monica Rivas.

“I was going to charge up my phone,” she said and moved a little closer to him. “But I have brought the wrong charger.”

“You can use mine if you want.”

“But there is no time, is there? You must leave in just a few minutes.”

“There's a little time,” he said.

He wasn't a bad looking man, she thought. Just a hair shy of six feet, perhaps a hundred seventy pounds. When he hit his forties, perhaps his light brown hair would thin on top, perhaps his belly would lap over his belt, but for now, he had a good body and a dopey but still charming smile that made her assignment not altogether unpleasant.

She tossed the phone and adapter cable on top of her dress, then stepped a little closer to him, her fingers toying with the loose knot holding the towel to his hips.

“You have a few minutes still?” she asked.

Pilar Soledad, back in character as Monica Rivas, stared up at him with her best doe-eyed innocent gaze.

“I, uh—” he stammered.

But he said no more, for with that the towel fell to his feet, and the woman he knew as Monica Rivas knelt before him, commanding his complete attention.

C
H
A
PTER
3

Outside her window, Dulles International Airport sank into the darkness. Pilar Soledad watched it fade to black, aware that something vital inside her was hardening. It was always the same on these return trips to San Antonio, as layer by layer she peeled away the fiction that was her life as Monica Rivas, Washington, D.C., lawyer, socialite and Mexican-American rights activist, leaving only a core of ice too numb to care for much of anything.

Her gaze shifted to her reflection in the window.

The woman looking back at her was gentle, kind, sweet. She wore silver hoop earrings and a light mineral makeup, a powder, with a cool, muted red lip gloss. Her black hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail that draped over the shoulder of her tweed suit jacket. It was a good look for her, professional and stylish, bespeaking of old money and cultured tastes.

But Monica Rivas was a lie.

Like everything else about her, Monica Rivas was a cold, cruel, carefully constructed lie. And in moments like this, as she faced the transition from Monica to Pilar, she felt so bitter. For all her struggles, all those years spent clawing her way out of the gutters of Ciudad Juarez, of fighting against the gangs that tried to turn her into a common whore, that for all that, she had achieved little more than a sort of pointless circularity, a racehorse going 'round in circles at full speed, never getting anywhere. There was so much hatred inside her, so much resentment at the world that had created her. Had she not learned to bury all that rage over the years she probably would have put a gun in her mouth and ended it all. Instead, she stared at her reflection and let the walls come up around her heart, one after another.

From beside her, she heard a sharp intake of breath, and turned from the window.

In the seat next to her was an old Hispanic woman, short and fat, her dark complexion indicating her Indio heritage. The woman was gripping the armrests of her seat, her teeth clenched, eyes shut hard.

Pilar reached over and took the woman's hand in hers. It was the kind of thing Monica would do.

Surprised, the woman looked at Pilar.

Then she smiled.

“Thank you,” she said, breathing a little easier now that she had someone to lend her strength.

“Taking off is always the hardest part,” Pilar said in Spanish.

The woman's smile brightened. “Oh, are you from San Antonio?”

“Yes. Well, years ago. I haven't been back in a long while.” The lie was practiced. It came easily.

Speaking Spanish seemed to relax the older woman, for the tension was gone from her face now. She even turned toward Pilar, as though they were sitting on a porch swing together rather than roaring steadily up to altitude.

“Are you going home then?” the woman asked.

“To your family?”

Automatically, at the mention of family, Pilar thought of Ramon Medina. It was hard to hold the smile on her face.

“Yes,” she said. “I still have some connections there.”

“How nice,” the woman said.

She went on talking, that old woman, but Pilar, for the most part, tuned her out. She was nodding politely, offering vague noises of encouragement now and then, but in her mind she'd turned back to darker times. She was thinking uneasy, alone thoughts, the kind of thoughts that kept her awake at night, staring up into the darkness, even when she was playing at being Monica Rivas.

She remembered a time, twenty years ago now, when she was in the back of an eighteen-wheeler with a boy she knew only as Lupe and fifty-three other migrant workers trying to get across the border into Texas. She had to have been eight, or possibly ten, because she'd been small enough to cower behind a field box that had recently been used to transport onions. She could smell them even now. And Lupe, he would have been younger than that, for she'd been able to shield him with her body when the old woman—an old woman much like the woman sitting next to her now—had gone into cardiac arrest from the heat and died.

She collapsed right next to them, and when Lupe saw the old woman was dead, her face slack and powdery white in the daylight that slipped through the cracks in the trailer's walls, he'd gone still. Even after all these years, she could still hear his silence next to her, how awestruck he had been at being closed in with the dead.

“Why won't they let us out?” Lupe asked. He huddled against her, trembling, even though it was hot like an oven in the trailer. They hadn't moved in a long while, and several of the men had kicked and scraped and pushed against the walls, one by one dropping from heatstroke and dehydration. Looking across the silhouetted forms crowded into the trailer, she could tell that most of them were dead already.

“They've probably left us here,” she said. “Disconnected the truck and left us here by the side of the road.”

“But why? We paid them, didn't we? We paid them what they wanted.”

She thought about the frightened look on the truck driver's face when he opened the back and learned that four of the migrants riding in his trailer had died. She thought about the men surging against the doors when they closed, their screams of rage and horror as the padlock clamped shut.

“Yes, we paid them.”

“Then why?” He was starting to whine.

She squeezed his hand until his whining turned to whimpers.

“Stop it,” she said. “Be quiet. Somebody will come soon.”

“My head hurts,” he said.

“You'll be okay.”

“I want to throw up.”

“You'll be okay. Just stay calm. Don't move if you don't have to. Somebody will come.”

To drive her memories of that time away she took the old woman's hand again.

“You're so very sweet,” the woman said.

Pilar smiled, wishing that were really true.

 

 

It was nearly midnight when she disembarked at San Antonio International Airport. The airport was almost deserted, the shops along the concourse all closed up, nobody but a few bored custodians wandering around. Pilar never checked baggage on these flights back and forth between Washington, D.C., and San Antonio. Everything she needed, and that wasn't much, she kept in her carry-on.

She made her way with the other passengers down to the exits where she rented a car on her Monica Rivas credit card. Less than ten minutes later, she had the airport in her rearview mirror and was looking for a place to pull over.

She found it in an abandoned gas station parking lot.

She turned out the lights, rolled down the windows, and waited. Washington had been hot and sticky with humidity when she left. Here, in San Antonio, it was even hotter, but the night air was dry and still and scented by a nearby magnolia tree in bloom. It pleased her. Even if coming back here stirred up a lot of memories she'd rather forget, there was still something satisfying, even welcoming, like a narcotic sleep, about the South Texas nights.

And with the windows open and the night air moving across her skin, she could almost hear Lupe laughing at the sparks rising on the hot air above the open fire they'd lit the night before they were to board the eighteen-wheeler and make the trip across the border. They were out on the black hills above Ciudad Juarez, behind a cluster of tarpaper shacks sitting on car tires. They didn't have anything to eat but some gum she'd stolen from a shop down in the city, but that was okay. Lupe was happy just listening to her talk about the wheel of fortune and what was in store for them.

“If you start at the bottom of the wheel and rise to the top, that's a comedy,” she said.

“And if you start at the top and you go to the bottom . . .”

“That's a tragedy,” she answered. “But that's not us.”

“We're like those sparks, right?” They both watched pinpoints of light rise into the air, winking out above their heads.

“That's right. Our life's a comedy.”

Oh, how he'd laughed about that.

And oh, how it hurt now to think about him laughing.

At 12:30
A.M.
, she took out her iPhone and called up a Gmail account that she shared with Ramon Medina, head of the Porra Cartel. The inbox contained a few junk e-mails, but those were unimportant. It was the draft folder with which she was concerned. The cartels had learned early on that the NSA routinely monitored international e-mail accounts. Anything going in or out of the country was scanned for key words and hot button topics by some of the most sophisticated software analytics ever devised. And when items of interest were developed, they were copied and read and the senders placed on the watch lists for more intensive scrutiny.

The Porra Cartel had figured out ways to be careful. Anytime they needed to relay large amounts of computer files, as she'd done with all the information she'd lifted from Paul Godwin's phone, they simply typed up an e-mail on the dummy account they shared and saved that e-mail in the draft folder. A simple routine was devised. When a scheduled check of the account was due, as hers was now, she simply logged in using the password they shared and checked for drafts. Unless the NSA knew the account name and the password, they stood almost no chance of intercepting the message.

Waiting in the drafts folder was a single message, written in Ramon Medina's clipped, terse style:

That was good, she thought. He'd liked what she'd sent him and felt like it was something they could use.

Great.

Now to see what he wanted her to do about it.

He'd given her directions to meet him, and she had a vague idea of where he meant. Ramon Medina never used the same place twice, but he generally felt more comfortable on San Antonio's west side.

She got on Loop 410 and headed west. The roads were nearly empty, much as the airport had been. Pilar put the car on cruise control—even though her Monica Rivas identity was airtight and the cops would never find anything if they stopped her, there was no reason to leave a footprint if she could help it—and headed into the darkness at the edge of town.

Her thoughts kept turning back to Lupe. The Texas Highway Patrol had finally rescued her from the eighteen-wheeler, but not before Lupe and thirty-nine others died of heatstroke. After that, she went to sleep every night hating herself, blaming herself for his death. She'd wake up in the morning hoping it had all been a sick nightmare, but of course it wasn't. He was just a child. He had counted on her, believed in her, and she'd let him down. That was the part that really chewed her up inside. She'd been careless. And now he was dead.

The Border Patrol had taken her from the Highway Patrol, questioned her, assigned her an identity card, and put her on an old school bus with bad air conditioning. Then they'd driven her back to the border, back to Ciudad Juarez. There they'd turned her out, a ten-year-old orphan left to wander the streets of the murder capital of the world. Other girls her age were forced into prostitution, but not Pilar. She learned to avoid the gangs, and even managed to steal the food she ate from right under their noses.

Ramon Medina was a young man then, still in his early twenties. He'd made a name for himself with a string of eight-liner gambling houses that catered to the American tourists, dozens of whorehouses and, of course, a tight leash on the growing trans-border drug trade. His personal office was one of the places Pilar went to steal food, and, more and more, money.

For two years she stole from him, until one night when he and three of his men had surprised her rifling through his safe, which she had learned to crack on one of her first visits. One of the men tried to grab her, but she fought him. He was three times her size, and still she fought. She almost got away, too. She would have, if Ramon hadn't put a pistol to the back of her head.

“So young,” he said. “And so ready to die.”

She closed her eyes and waited for the shot.

But it didn't come.

For as different as the cartels were, they all shared a strong patriarchal structure. Women were good for decoration, and for recreation, but not for business. Still, something about her had impressed him. She was feisty. She was smart. At twelve, she had succeeded in robbing him blind, getting in and out of his compound with the ease of a professional burglar. She would have gone on stealing from him, too, if he hadn't been forced to come back here unexpectedly. Ramon knew talent when he saw it, and he saw it in her.

Over the next six years he made her into a real professional. By her late teens, she could slip in and out of any compound, government or otherwise, like a ghost. And she was a natural with computers, with financial networks, with business management. She became indispensable to him, helping in every part of his operation.

Even the killing.

As his operations in America grew, he created the Monica Rivas alter ego. He built a fictitious biography for her, making her the only daughter of one of Mexico's wealthiest coal barons. He got her into Harvard, paid her way. He paid her way through law school at the University of Virginia, too.

In return, she'd become his faithful spy in Washington.

Ramon Medina, she thought. There had been a time, years ago, when she actually believed she was in love with him.

But she was older now. She knew better.

She turned her car into a church parking lot that bordered the abandoned warehouse Ramon was using for this meeting and parked behind a large cluster of shrubs that had gone to riot. The church was small and poor looking, which probably meant it didn't have video cameras, but there was no point in being careless.