In Desperation

58

Lago de Rosas, Mexico

The phone in the priest’s rectory was an old wall-mounted touch-tone.

Father Francisco Ortero was folding his laundered shirts when it rang. He went to the kitchen and answered it.

“Is this Ortero, the priest who hears confessions in Lago de Rosas?”

The young male voice was familiar.

“Si,” Ortero said.

“This is the sicario you promised to help.”

Several icy seconds of silence passed.

“I told you I would be calling, Father. You remember our discussion?”

“Yes.” Ortero adjusted his grip on the handset.

“And my proposal?”

“Yes.”

“I am about to finish my last job.”

“Don’t go through with it. Surrender, I beg you.”

“Listen to me. You made a promise in the confessional to help me.”

“You must stop.”

“Have you arranged for a journalist you trust to tell my story?”

Ortero thought of all the funerals of the innocents murdered by narcotraficantes that he had officiated; how the bloodshed had challenged his faith.

How much suffering does God allow?

“Father? Have you arranged for a journalist you trust to tell my story?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Take note of this information.”

The sicario gave the priest the time and the location near Phoenix, Arizona, where the journalist was to meet him tomorrow, confirming what the priest had suspected.

“Please, surrender. Police everywhere are looking for you and the others. Your faces are on all the news channels. Surrender!”

“It does not matter now. I am nearly finished.”

“Please, I beg you, no more killing. Surrender now and atone.”

“This is how it must happen. This is how it will happen.”

The priest was disgusted with himself. He was aiding a sicario. He squeezed the handset as revulsion and fear coiled within him. What he was doing was akin to the devil’s bidding.

“I am considering sending police,” Ortero said.

“You would break the seal of the confessional?”

“What if it did not matter? What if I stopped being a priest to stop the killing?”

“If you send police, I will kill the girl before their eyes in the most memorable way you could ever imagine.”

“I beg you to surrender.”

“The girl’s life is in your hands, priest. Your betrayal would result in her death. I have killed nearly two hundred people. Do you think I would hesitate to kill her? Do you want to gamble her life with an executioner of my stature?”

“Do you want to gamble with eternal damnation?”

“That is exactly what I’m doing,” the sicario said. “I know my days are numbered. Either way I am damned. This is my last chance at a new life. Send the reporter, or the girl will die. Wait. You anger me, Father. Maybe she will die anyway. Consider this your only hope to save her.”

The line went dead.

Shaking, Ortero fell back to the wall, sliding down to the floor.

What have I set in motion?

59

Near Phoenix, Arizona

Angel dragged the back of his hand across his mouth to contend with his mounting tension.

Could he trust the priest?

It didn’t matter. Angel knew that the cartel was going to kill him when this job was finished.

That he had enacted his survival plan gave him a measure of relief as he walked across the abandoned hangar, focusing on Limon-Rocha and Tecaza ready at the small table. They’d changed into their police uniforms and looked like real cops sitting there, listening to emergency scanners, checking their weapons, waiting for a green light.

“They’ve got an alert out for a license plate belonging to Galviera.” Limon-Rocha tilted his head to the scanners. “Nobody can find him. Maybe he did the smart thing and changed the plate, or his vehicle.”

“So, do we go now?” Tecaza asked.

“Did you secure the girl?” Angel asked him.

“Yes.”

Angel’s cell phone rang. It was Thirty.

“Are you set?”

“We’re ready.”

“I’ve just contacted him and set up the meeting. Do you have a detailed map?”

Angel snapped open the new fanfold map. With one hand, he spread it over one end of the table and pinpointed where Thirty directed them to go.

“He will be at that location in two hours.”

“We’ll leave now.”

“And bring the girl. Let him see she is alive. He’ll be cooperative if he thinks he is returning with her. Then you do your job and come home. Twenty-five will want to thank you personally.”

“Personally?”

“You know he thinks you are the best.”

Angel swallowed the lie, tapping the phone against his leg as he studied the map before making precise folds.

“It’s time,” he said to Tecaza. “Get the girl.”

Tecaza, keen to get back to Mexico, strode to the room where he’d chained Tilly to the pipe. A moment later, a stream of cursing filled the empty building as he ran back to the table and riffled through the equipment bag.

“She got away.”

Incredulous, Limon-Rocha and Angel ran to the room. After confirming what they’d been told, they’d returned to see Tecaza climbing the stairs to the roof, a small case slung over his shoulder.

“She could not have gone far,” Tecaza said. “Ruiz, get your night-vision goggles! Help me look for her!”

Both men had military-issue binoculars that enabled them to see human images in the dark by perceiving thermal radiation or body heat. On the roof, goggles pressing over their eyes, they scanned the empty, flat land surrounding the abandoned airfield. Limon-Rocha searched clockwise, while Tecaza, cursing the whole time, searched counterclockwise, finding nothing but a sea of black, the edges occasionally dotted by distant lights.

A tiny flicker of brilliant white shot by the rim of Tecaza’s lens.

He froze.

He moved back slowly until he found it again.