Velocity

“Robby was already there. They sent me on an errand. At the time, I didn’t think there was anything up. But then when I got back, Robby was surrounded by five guys. Guevara, a top Cortez lieutenant named Ernesto Escobar, and three others I didn’t know. But they weren’t friendlies.”

“Why do you say that?” DeSantos asked.

“Because they weren’t treating Robby very good.”

“Don’t mince words. What did you see?”

“I wasn’t there when it started. But I heard the noise. I hid behind a car. What I saw . . . it was hard to watch, but I knew if I tried helping Robby, I’d either blow my cover or if I played along, they’d expect me to . . . I—I just couldn’t do that.” He closed his eyes. “I wouldn’t have been able to hurt my buddy.” He shook his head, then faced Vail. “I took off, kept a low profile, caught a ride with a trucker out of town. Figured, worse came to worst, I might be able to go back, make up some bullshit excuse for being gone.”

“And,” DeSantos said, “you figured, if Robby’s cover’s blown, yours was probably worth shit too, since you’re the one who vouched for him. They might kill you before they killed him.”

Sebastian didn’t respond. He continued to pick at the Powerade label.

Vail was sure DeSantos’s analysis was accurate, but she didn’t want to move off topic. She swallowed hard. “What were they doing to Robby?”

Sebastian clenched his jaw, looked down at his Powerade. “Yelling at him in Spanish. Working him over. Kicking him. Worse.”

Vail closed her mouth. She couldn’t let anyone in the room see how much it hurt to hear that.

DeSantos placed a hand on her forearm. With a quick flick, she shook it off. She knew he meant well and she appreciated the gesture, but that wasn’t what she wanted to project to the men in the room.

“A guy like you,” DeSantos said, “you’ve got CIs with their ears to the ground. If there’s something to be known about Robby’s . . . disposition . . . they’d hear about it.”

“I’m not going anywhere, not for a couple days. Believe me, I tried talking to the doc. He didn’t want to have any of it.”

“Then us,” Vail said. “Set it up. We’ll do the meet.”

Sebastian leaned back in his seat. “That could work, I guess.”

“No,” Yardley said, stepping forward.

Sebastian looked up at the ASAC. “All I gotta do is call my guy, let him know—”

“Absolutely not.”

Vail rose from her seat and faced Yardley, toe to toe. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

Yardley, a few inches taller than Vail, stood his ground. “Soon as the doc clears him,” he said calmly, “Sebastian will go. He’s worked too hard, too long, to cultivate his CIs. Especially this one, who’s got reliable roots right into the goddamn cartel. We screw it up, guy so much as smells something bad, we may never find a replacement.”

“I realize Robby’s ‘only’ a task force officer, but he deserves 100 percent effort on our part—all our parts—to get him out of danger.”

“Agent Vail, we don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

Body blow to the gut. Don’t take that shit. “Listen to me,” she said, bringing an index finger up toward his face. “With your help or not, I’m going to find Robby. Dead or alive. We owe that to him. I owe it to him. If my fuckup is responsible for blowing his cover, it’s on me.”

“I understand you don’t like it,” Yardley said, “but this is the way we handle these matters. Soon as we can, Sebastian will meet with the CI with regard to the issues at hand and then we’ll get back to you.”

Yardley started to turn away, but Vail grabbed his forearm. “When?”

He spoke while looking down at her hand. “We’ll do what we can, when we can. But how we do it, and when, and what resources we use to do it, is our business, not yours.” He brought his gaze up to hers. “I know you’re concerned about Hernandez, but there are multiple lives at stake. You think he’s the only asset we have in that organization?”

Vail dropped her hand. She was not prepared for that.

DeSantos was by her side. “Look,” he said, both hands out in front of him, fingers spread, a calming gesture. “I can make some calls. Go over your head. Have one director talk to another director. And get that information. Or I can go to my sources and dig up who this CI is that Sebastian won’t disclose. Either way, we will get what we want. Both ways are messy for you.” He shrugged. “Your choice.”

Yardley looked at DeSantos with a tournament-winning poker face. “Fuck you. And you too, Agent Vail.” He turned to Sebastian. “We’re done here.”

Yardley walked to the door and flung it open. “This is a DEA investigation, Mr. DeSantos. Interfere, and I don’t care what juice you can pour. I’ll make sure it goes sour. So if it’s a pissing contest you want, have at it.”

DeSantos returned his poker face, then he and Vail started for the door—but not before Vail glanced back over her shoulder at Sebastian. He was biting his lower lip and picking at the Powerade label.

Vail had a sharp rebuke for him on the tip of her tongue, but held it. As DeSantos had implied, Sebastian abandoned Robby out of fear for his own life. But it was her fault, not his, that Robby’s life was in danger in the first place. And now it was her responsibility to find him.

Before it was too late.

53

They got into the Corvette and DeSantos gunned the engine and peeled out of the parking lot. “You’re doing your best to make my life difficult, you know that, Karen?”

Vail released her grip on the dashboard. “What?”

“I played our hand and I had nothing.”

“What about ‘I’ll call the director’?”

DeSantos brought the Vette to a screeching halt. “Karen.” He licked his lips, looked off into the distance as he gathered his thoughts. “I can’t call the FBI director every time I can’t get what I want. I don’t even work for him— he’s a . . . let’s just say I’ve got a special relationship with him. Bottom line, I bluffed. Yardley called it. That’s it.”

Vail covered her eyes with a hand. Great. “What about working your resources?”

“My resources, my assets and CIs and everything else I use for terrorism-related intel, is valuable shit. I can’t use it for stuff like this. One life . . . I don’t want this to come out the wrong way. But I deal with threats that involve dignitaries or U.S. congressmen, thousands—sometimes millions—of civilians. I can’t burn though valuable assets for this. I just can’t.”

“Wait a minute. Sebastian said something . . . ” She thought a moment, then said, “He may’ve been trying to tell us something.”

“Yeah. He and Yardley told us to go fuck ourselves.”

“No, no. He said he could call up his CI.”

DeSantos looked at Vail. “His phone records. If we can look through the calls he’s made in the past, what, three months—we may have his CI.”

“We’ll never get access to his records.”

“Legally,” DeSantos said. “We’ll never get his records legally. I’ve got other ways.”

“Ways that won’t burn your assets?”

“Exactly.” He shoved the gearshift into drive and stepped on the accelerator. Vail flew back in her seat. Only this time she didn’t mind. As far as she was concerned, the faster, the better.

54

At the Pentagon security booth, DeSantos spoke with the guard while Vail waited in the car. The telephone was lifted, words were exchanged, and a moment later DeSantos was climbing back into the Corvette.