already know what we had to have to do it.”
They all pondered that a moment as Alfredo jammed the last of his tortilla into his mouth.
Sabella looked at each of them. “Anything else?”
They shrugged and shook their heads.
“Ghazi sends his congratulations and sincere gratitude to each of you,” Sabella said. “Everyone has been paid?”
Nods all around.
Out of habit and without even arranging it, the men drifted away from the warehouse one at a time over the next half hour. A few more loads of personal items disappeared as well, and soon everyone was gone except Sabella and his driver and bodyguards.
Each of them retreated into the dark reaches of the warehouse and returned with five-gallon plastic containers of diesel fuel. They kept retrieving containers until twenty of them stood around. They did not want an explosion, but they needed a fire that would be very destructive. Because diesel fuel burned hot, this would be guaranteed. They began emptying the fuel over everything under the wash of lights, working quickly to prevent fumes from accumulating and building to an explosive density.
The fire was burning along a trail headed into the warehouse as they got into the van and sped out of the maze of old buildings. Despite their plans, there was a concussive whump! an almost lazy, muffled explosion, as the warehouse was engulfed in flames. They felt the shudder of the concussion even inside the van, which was now many streets away.
As the van rattled back into the heart of the city, Sabella gazed out of the window, the sporadic bursts of secure communication playing softly in the background. His thoughts turned to what he had to do next.
Jude had been a puzzle to him from the beginning, when he first met him in Ciudad del Este. At first, Sabella had been sure that Jude was somehow connected to U.S. intelligence. He had come within a hair of having him killed, along with that impetuous idiot Ahmad, who had brought Jude into the picture. But something had made him hold off.
Sabella had watched Jude carefully on a video feed from the lobby of the shabby waterfront hotel. Jude had handled being dragged through the maze of his initial vetting with an accepting equanimity. It seemed that he knew what was happening, and he endured it the way a donkey endures a hailstorm, with wincing patience, with resignation and the understanding that it wouldn’t last forever. If he was nervous at being put through the scrubbing process, he didn’t let it show.
But when he had had enough, when he thought they’d taken it too far, he told them to fuck off. And he meant it. He had made the judgment that whatever good they might be for each other, it wasn’t worth the price of admission. But then when Baida finally arrived, Jude held no grudges and quickly got down to business. That was when the conversations got interesting, and Sabella grew to like the Texan, who kept his own smuggling operation very close to the vest.
And then there was the discovery of commonalities. Sabella remembered having to drag these bits of information out of him when he interviewed him in Ciudad del Este. Jude grudgingly revealed his background, and the behavior that gave Sabella some relief from his suspicions. Often a mole would too readily reveal mutual interests with his target, trying too hard to establish a common ground in an effort to make the target identify with him and feel comfortable.
Not Jude. His world was his world, and he wanted to keep it that way. If Sabella didn’t ask, Jude didn’t tell, and even when he did, he didn’t tell very much. Jude never volunteered anything. He was more interested in how he could make money moving anything they wanted him to move. Anything but drugs, that is. No drugs. Which was okay with Sabella, who already had that covered anyway.
So eventually they had gotten around to their pasts, and Sabella finally managed to get Jude to reveal that he had attended the University of Texas, too. One thing led to another, and as time passed, Sabella found himself liking the guy. Which was a mistake. You could trust people (up to a point, of course, never absolutely), you could rely on them and give them responsibility, but you could never allow yourself to like them.
And maybe that was the only problem with Jude, and nothing more than that. Sabella just liked the guy, and that in itself set off the infinitesimal tremors of suspicion. Maybe, after all these years, it had come down to that: Circumstances were more meaningful than the people who populated them. Situation overrode character and personality. The extraordinary efforts that Sabella had to employ simply to stay alive had become what it meant to be alive. He had become the process to the extent that he was now little more than the process.
But now he had to move on to the next phase of his plan. And Jude was either exactly the right man to make it work for him or exactly the wrong man. It was time to find out which of the two he was.
Chapter 33
From her place at the edge of the light, Susana called Kevern on her encrypted cell phone. Bern gathered from her side of the conversation that they were in a safe house, and that Kevern was as stunned as they were that Bern’s impersonation had actually worked. Susana also passed on the name of Estele de Leon Pheres, and then she explained the situation with Baida and said he was waiting for a response from Bern. There was some conversation about that, during which Susana said very little.
Bern watched her profile as she listened; she was shifting her weight, her movement nearly imperceptible at the edge of the shadow. He sensed that she was weighing her options. She must do that a thousand times a day, he thought, weighing the consequences of speaking or not speaking, of revealing or not revealing, of finessing a phrase this way or that. It was a life of calculation, of factoring in, of making choices.
It was, he guessed, a life of never really knowing if you had done the right thing or not, because the ramifications of having made a different choice were too complex to play out to a logical end. He wasn’t even sure there were any logical ends in the life she lived.
Finally, the conversation ended, and she snapped the phone closed.
“Okay,” she said, “Mondragon’s boys are at Mingo’s place now. Kevern’s going to pass on the information about Estele de Leon.
“In the meantime, we need to come up with a plan for you to meet with Baida again, something to drag this out a little. There’s a possibility that Quito’s people will come up with something useful from Mingo’s girls. Or if they find Estele de Leon in time, maybe she’ll come up with some information that will help us in arranging this next meeting. If they do, that could change things. But for right now, we have to play this as if those possibilities don’t exist. Kevern and his team are going to put their heads together, and then we’ll get back in touch and see what we’ve got.”
The rain continued off and on.
“Every hour, a quarter past the hour,” Susana said, confirming Baida’s instructions.
“Yeah,” Bern said. All he could think of was that this was impossible. How were the two of them going to contrive a convincing plan? And what in the hell was he going to do when the meeting actually took place? Like so much else about this madness, it seemed to be over-the-top. He couldn’t believe that people actually did these sorts of things, and that whether they lived or died depended upon success or failure in these endeavors.
The rainy night was breathless now, and the curtains hung as limp as old promises.
Bern turned on the bed and bent over and pulled off his shoes and socks. Then he shed his shirt, draping it over his suit coat on the chair.
Susana didn’t say anything. In the dusky light, he couldn’t see the finer points of her features-the little wrinkle between her eyebrows that showed she was worried or thoughtful, the pull at the corner of her mouth that foretold a change of mind. She was staring toward the window again.
With a sigh, she turned to the window, unbuttoned her dress all the way down to her stomach, and then fanned the sides for air. After a little while, she turned and came back to the bed and sat down, leaning against the headboard like Bern. She seemed oddly reluctant to begin the planning.
“What happened to Mondragon’s face?” Bern asked.
“Somebody took it off for him,” she said. “No one knows the real story. There are only outrageous rumors, everything from brujo curses to a sexual fantasy gone wrong. I don’t think anyone really knows. No one’s talking
