early.”
When we drove off, Junior was still standing in the middle of the parking lot, looking for all the world like a man without a country.
18
The final execution of a counterinsurgency plan is to not just defeat the insurgency, but cripple the will of anyone who might want to follow in the insurgents’ footsteps.
For a man like Eduardo Santiago, there would always be people gunning to bring him down. He was too powerful now. He’d forgotten where he came from. He was no more than a crook with a collar. And then people really gunning for him: The Latin Emperors were not going to disappear. As long as there were prisons, as long as there was poverty and drugs and violence, there would be the Latin Emperors. And as long as Father Eduardo was alive, there would be a Latin Emperor who would think that the way to earn his stripes would be to get the man who snitched out Junior Gonzalez.
Unless they were too damn scared of the power Father Eduardo still had from his perch in the church. That meant creating a mystique of fear. And the only way you scared hard knocks like the Latin Emperors was to attack them in a way they could not quantify.
Like through the air.
Fiona and I sat idling in the Charger across the street from Honrado when we saw an eighteen-wheeler roll tentatively down the street. I couldn’t make out the face of the driver in the cab, but thought that the tattooed arm draped out the window was a pretty good sign that the driver wasn’t under the employ of Harding. It was seven P.M. and the Honrado campus was clear of people… except for the ones Barry and Sam were training in the art of counterfeiting this fine evening.
I called Sam. “Delivery is here,” I said.
“That’s great,” Sam said.
“You sound a little distracted,” I said.
“Mikey, we’re printing money in here.”
“I’d like to remind you that you’re a federal employee,” I said.
“You know that pension I was worried about?”
“Sam.”
“I just saw it roll off a press and get cut into exact replicas of twenty-dollar bills. And that was just on a practice run.”
“Where’s Barry?”
“He’s holding forth with the gangsters,” Sam said. “You know, in another life, he might have made a pretty good professor. The kids really respond to him.”
“Don’t let him leave with anything in his pockets tonight,” I said.
“Mikey, I’m not going to frisk him.”
“Sam, I will have Fiona frisk both of you,” I said.
“Fine, Mikey, fine. Just know that I have seen temptation and I have walked away from it a better man. Or I will. I will. Yes, I will.”
“Where’s Father Eduardo?”
“He finished up the bake sale at three, and I brought him back to your mother’s. He’s far away from here.”
“No one followed you?”
“There was a car that picked us up leaving here,” Sam said. “And then another that picked us up at the corner. So I had Father Eduardo call the mayor and see if he could pop into the mayor’s quarters for a quick talk about something pressing. But the mayor wasn’t in.”
“So what did you do?”
“Drove over there, anyway, and sat around for twenty minutes while Father Eduardo chatted up the security detail and mentioned that it looked like some gangsters were loitering around out front. So the security detail went out and arrested them. Turns out they were bad guys. I gotta tell you, Mikey, it’s hard to be a covert operative and a hard-core gangster at the same time. Tough to be inconspicuous while you’re thumping your bass.”
“Occupational hazard,” I said.
“I got the truck in my sights here,” Sam said.
“Let it back into the loading dock and then get rid of the driver. Don’t open the container until the driver is gone. Got it?”
“On it,” Sam said, and hung up.
Outside, a young woman pushed a baby in a stroller. A man sat on the porch of his apartment and read the newspaper. Two boys rode by on matching low-rider bicycles.
“What’s the point of that?” Fiona said.
“The bikes?”
“Yes, the bikes.”
“Look cool, I guess,” I said.
“Father Eduardo needs to start talking to these kids from the moment of conception.”
In the backseat of the Charger was the residue from fifty cakes of portosyt. We’d stopped off at Lowe’s on the way over and purchased enough of the chemical to either stave off an entire football field of wild grass or render unconscious, with the help of fentanyl, an entire generation of gangsters. It was now stacked innocuously inside a garbage can just beside the loading dock where Sam was.
“You sure we have the right combination of chemicals?” I asked.
“If not,” Fiona said, “what’s the worst that could happen?”
“Fiona, I’d prefer not to deal with those kinds of scenarios. It’s the grounds of a church.”
“Oh, Michael, always so pious,” she said. “We’ll need at least five hundred fentanyl patches’ worth of gel to dissolve with the portosyt.”
“We should be fine,” I said.
In an optimum situation, we’d pump the gas into the ventilation system of the printing-press room, but the entire facility was enjoined by the same system, which meant that we’d need to dissolve the chemicals in the same space as the gangsters in order to control it.
Our plan was extraordinarily high-tech: We’d combine the two chemicals, along with the appropriate amount of distilled water, in this case two jugs, which we’d already poured inside the garbage can, and place it in the facility while they worked. It would take about five minutes for the chemicals to become a strong enough gas to knock them out. The sustained propagation of the gas, combined with the oxygen in the room, would keep them under like an anesthetic for the duration of the dissolve time. Which in this case would be about three hours.
Or enough time to alert the proper authorities to a bunch of gangsters who’d broken into the plant and started making counterfeit money.
Provided nothing went wrong, which seemed to be the case until Junior Gonzalez and Killa pulled up in front of us in the parking lot, hood to hood. Except that Junior and Killa were in a lowered Honda Accord and we were in the Charger.
“Act natural,” I said through my smile to Fiona. “And by that I mean don’t shoot them until it seems like the last resort.”
“Always with the rules,” she said.
I got out of the car and walked to the driver’s-side window and peered in. “Something I can do for you, Junior?”
“Just wondering what you were doing sitting here on point,” Junior said.
“Wanted to make sure the truck arrived,” I said. “How’s your knee, Killa?” Killa kept staring forward. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of black wraparound sunglasses.
“Where’s the boy?” Junior asked.
“Safe,” I said. “You’ll get him tomorrow. As we previously determined.”
