Damage Control

take us to the snitch. Then all we have to do is take them all out.”

“You say that as if it’s a simple thing to do. Have you any idea where Harris and his friends are?”

“Actually, I do. They had a bit of a firefight. They won, of course. But they couldn’t have gotten very far because the Mexican Army is out in force, looking for them. They even know what vehicle to look for. I’ve already talked with the Army commander down there, and he’s ordering his troops to sight and follow.”

“We can’t let them get through,” Munro said. The true ramifications of this new discovery hit him in a rush, eliciting an audible gasp. “My God, this means they know everything. We know they’ve connected the dots to the cathedral, and because they’re hooking up with this informer, that means they’ve connected it back to the drugs and Hernandez.”

“That’s the way I see it,” Sjogren said. “But there’s light at the end of that tunnel, too, if you look hard enough for it. Apparently, they need this guy’s testimony to make any kind of case. Otherwise, they’d be all over Hernandez, and after that, they’d be all over you.”

“You need to get a name,” Munro pressed. “We cannot wait for Harris to hook up with the informer. We need to take the informer out first.”

“I don’t think anybody disagrees with you, Sport, but weren’t you listening? We don’t know who the hell she is. Your butt buddy’s got himself a hell of an operation down there. I imagine it could be any one of hundreds of people. It’s not like they’re salt-of-the-earth types like me and you.”

Munro pulled the phone away from his ear and let it dangle by his side for a few seconds while he collected his thoughts. Part of having a disciplined mind was the ability to control the flow of information. This situation was at the proverbial tipping point, equally capable of going well for him or turning into a complete catastrophe. Progress one way or the other would be entirely dependent on the decisions he made in the next few minutes.

And then the decisions to be made after those. And after those. On and on for God only knew how long it would take. Munro needed to embrace this as a siege, not a-

As a bell rang in his head, Munro brought the phone back to his ear.

“-did you go? For God’s sake, Trev-”

“I’m here,” Munro said. “I had to put you down so I could think. Tell me where this shootout was. The one the Harris and his team won.”

“A few hours north of the exchange site,” Sjogren said. “North and east. I don’t have a name of the town. Hell, I don’t even know if there is a town. That’s still pretty remote country.”

“So they were still in the jungles?”

“Oh, hell yeah.”

“And who was killed in the shootout?”

“What, you want names?”

Munro rolled his eyes. “Heaven forbid,” he said. “We all know that names are beyond you.”

“Hey, screw you, Trev.”

“Of course I don’t need names. I don’t know these people. But who were they? Bystanders? Local cops? Army?”

“Oh, they were definitely Army. Why does that matter?”

This is what happened when you’re forced to deal with people of inferior intellect. You had to explain everything. “It matters because Harris knows he’s being looked for. He knows that the Army is involved, and he may very well know that they will recognize his vehicle.”

“How would he know that?”

“I would assume, were I he, that the group who spotted them would have called it in on the radio. Isn’t that in fact how your Army friends know the identity of the vehicle?”

Sjogren’s response was more guttural than verbal. Having some of his shit fed back to him apparently disagreed with him.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Munro pressed. “So, if they think that they’re being looked for, don’t you think they may take some countermeasures? Perhaps they’ve changed vehicles by now. Isn’t that what you would do?”

“Yeah, I suppose I might.”

“So here’s the bottom line, Sjogren. You don’t have a clue what you’re looking for out there. You can’t follow what you can’t see, and without following, there’s no stopping these people. You need to get a name.”

“I don’t have a name, Trev.” Sjogren’s voice vibrated with frustration. Munro had clearly struck a nerve. “It’s not like I’m holding out on you. I don’t have it.”

“I don’t hire you for what you know,” Munro fired back. “I hire you for the information that your contacts know. Sounds to me like it’s time to put some more pressure on your own butt buddy in the U.S. attorney’s office.”

“He doesn’t know, either. If he did, he’d tell me.”

Munro closed his eyes as he fought to control his temper. “Don’t concentrate on what he does know. Concentrate on what he can know. Everything’s possible when the stakes are high enough.”

All the derision was gone from the Bostonian. In fact for the very first time in Munro’s memory, Jerry Sjogren may have just been rendered speechless.

“Hey, Jerry?” Munro said.

“Abrams.”

“Right. You know that part I said about anything being possible when the stakes are high enough? You might want to take that one personally.”

He pushed the disconnect button. As he turned back to the business of fixing dinner, he felt a sense of calm, as if he might have taken the first step toward victory.

Maria Elizondo stuffed three hundred thousand American dollars-all hundred-dollar bills, banded in five- thousand-dollar stacks-into a Tyvek envelope, sealed it, and placed the package on a shelf in the massive safe that sat next to her desk. That brought the daily total to three million five hundred forty-two thousand dollars. She made the appropriate notations in the ledger book, and then placed that into the safe as well. She pushed the door closed, turned the bolt, and then spun the lock.

It was time to go home. Her office, such as it was, occupied one hundred square feet of tile-floored grandeur in the far southeast corner of the main building of the compound known as Hacienda del Sol-a ridiculously pretentious name, she thought, for a hideous concrete bunker of a house surrounded by fifteen-foot-high walls in one of the more squalid sectors of Ciudad Juarez, which itself was one of the most squalid cities on earth. Yet another expression of narcissism from a man whose opinion of himself could not possibly be overstated.

Maria shed the sweater that she always wore to counter the chill of the air-conditioning and hung it over the back of her chair, where it would be waiting for her in the morning. She had to hurry now, before another delivery of cash was dropped through the louvered steel slot in the reinforced concrete wall.

She grew so tired of the overbright yellow light that shined from behind the wire-reinforced recessed light fixtures in the ceiling that some days she swore that she felt ill from the lack of sunshine and unfiltered air. After days like today-ten hours without a break-she thought she might go mad if she had to face this one more time.

Face it she would, though, because Felix Hernandez trusted her, and only a fool denied Felix what he desired.

With all surfaces cleared, and all drawers and cabinets locked, she picked up the telephone receiver from its hook on the wall next to the entrance and waited while the call completed itself. The person on the other end of the line answered it merely by picking it up. Protocol prohibited him from saying anything until he was spoken to.

Maria said, “Purple, sapphire, salmon, moon.”

The guard on the other end said, “Apple, rose, seawater, penguin.”

The random words were chosen anew every morning, and they needed to be recited in precisely the correct order for either Maria or her security counterpart on the other side to unlock their side of the door. This was part of Felix’s paranoia that his enemies might somehow gain control of the compound, and by so doing merely wait patiently until it was time for the occupant of the vault to go home, and when the door opened therefore have access to his money.

He called it double redundancy, which in Maria’s mind was itself singly redundant.