“I don’t know.”
“You don’t trust me anymore, do you?”
“Um, if you’d like me to leave, can I go into the other vault?” asked Sonia, shifting her weight awkwardly from side to side.
“No, that’s okay, you stay,” said Miguel, hardening his tone just a little. “I think maybe the issue is that you don’t trust me. If you’ve had nothing to hide, then why didn’t you show me this place years ago?”
“Because I wanted you to trust me. You have no idea how important that is. Don’t dismiss it. Do you want to see the other vault?”
“It’s just more of the same, huh?”
“I need another house to display all of this. Your mother always said my eyes were too big for my stomach, and that applies to my purchases as well.”
Miguel realized at that moment that he’d been wasting his time. If his father really wanted to conceal something from him, he wouldn’t have done it as obviously as saying
“Miguel, I want nothing but the best for you. There’s nothing illegal about what I do. The newspapers will print anything to sell copies and sell advertising. They’ve called me a criminal for years, but you’ve seen what I’ve tried to do in our country, how much I’ve tried to give back. I am sincere about that. Your mother taught me more than you know about how to open my heart.”
Miguel looked to Sonia, who was pursing her lips and nodding.
“Then I have to ask you something. Before they killed Raul, he begged them, said the cartel would pay anything. If he worked for us, then why would he ask the cartel to pay?”
His father shrugged. “I don’t know. Fernando recruits many of those people himself. I have no doubt that some may have once belonged to the cartel, and we save them from that life.”
Miguel took a deep breath. “If I ask you something, will you promise to tell me the truth?”
His father nodded.
“Are you doing business with the drug cartels?”
His father grinned weakly and looked away. “No, of course not.”
“All right, then. I’m sorry.”
His father began to choke up. He moved suddenly toward Miguel and hugged him deeply. “You are my only son. You are my world. You have to believe in me.”
The lie caused a deep and terrible pain to wake in Rojas’s heart, and that pain took him to a place where his murdered brother stared back at him with a weird reflection in his eyes and his wife lay motionless in her casket, her beautiful skin now alabaster and lifeless. The lie was death itself.
As he embraced his son, he fought to leave that place, tried to convince himself that he was not, in a sense, murdering them both by keeping the secret, that it was all for the boy’s own good.
But the pain was so great that he wished he could take Miguel and Sonia to the back of the vault, open the well-disguised panel doors there, and show his son the second vault — the vault within the vault — where millions in American dollars were waiting to be laundered …
He should be the one to confess his sins. Miguel should not have to learn from a second party.
But another part of Rojas argued staunchly against that. Everything should be as always. His wife had never learned the ugly truth, and neither should his son.
Rojas released his son and stared deeply into the boy’s eyes as a chill rippled across his shoulders.
Yes, the lie was death.
34 THE HAND OF FATIMA
It wasn’t that Moore regretted his decision to flee back into the tunnel. After all, he’d received two simultaneous pieces of information and had reacted to them in an instant: (1) they’d been spotted, and (2) a large group was inside the warehouse.
Fight or flight.
What frustrated him most was that the mission to follow the money was over. The trail had ended the second that punk had spotted them. He tried to convince himself that there was nothing they could’ve done differently. It was simply a matter of bad timing (flashback to Somalia and that fiasco, wherein they sent him in a few days late and a dollar short). Sure, he and Ansara would tell Towers about the Ford Explorer, and they’d track the vehicle with their eyes in the sky and Towers’s civilian informants, perhaps even get permission to intercept it and seize the weapons and maybe even confiscate the cash, but Moore had been counting on identifying a much more definitive link between the cartel and Jorge Rojas, at least via one of Rojas’s businesses.
Ansara was sprinting up the tunnel, increasing the gap, but Moore was beginning to slow as he heard the thundering boots of men coming down the staircase behind them. He stopped, spun around, and dropped onto his belly as, lit by the flickering light from the tunnel entrance, a figure rushed forward, arm extended. For just a heartbeat Moore glimpsed his assailant’s face: the cartel truck’s driver.
Propped up on his elbows now, Moore fired once into the figure’s chest, the round booting him sideways into the panels before he fell onto his back.
From behind him came two more men, the rest of the weapons-transfer crew, their Belgian-made cop-killer pistols flashing, the shots booming through the tunnel as one 5.7x28-millimeter round struck the pipe near Moore’s elbow.
Their winking muzzles betrayed their positions, and drawing deeply on decades of experience — and his rage — he targeted the first man, delivered a pair of rounds into his chest, then panned slightly to the right and unloaded his magazine into the second guy, who staggered backward as though he were being electrocuted.
As Moore ejected his magazine and scrambled to his feet, about to turn back toward Ansara, the far end of the tunnel vanished.
Just like that.
That faint beam of shifting light that had fallen on the wooden staircase had been extinguished in a nanosecond, replaced by a huge wall of earth and dust, accompanied by an explosion that originated from both sides of the wall, sending a blast wave of dirt and rocks and pieces of support beams boomeranging through the shaft.
Moore was intimately familiar with the sound of cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, or C-4 plastic explosives, and as the debris began to pelt him, a second explosion hammered behind him, this one much closer, the ground rumbling more violently, and then a third explosion thundered through the first two, this one even closer, as he whirled back and sprinted, echoing his first admonishment to Ansara: “Run!” That cry was all reflex and reaction; Ansara didn’t need any more motivation.
Even as he shifted past the turns, believing that each ninety-degree angle would further protect him, more detonations tore apart the tunnel, timed to blow in succession and drawing nearer. Up on his right lay the little sanctuary flickering in candlelight. As he passed, he saw Ansara trying to lift Rueben into a fireman’s carry.
Moore cursed but kept running. “Forget him! We gotta go!”
“He’s still not dead!”
The next explosion occurred so closely that Moore thought his eardrums had been blown out. The dust clouds and debris wave filled the tunnel now, dousing the candles and cutting off Ansara as he begged for another second.
Gasping and blinded, Moore ran forward, unsure if his partner was behind him. He banged straight into the ladder as an explosion near where the acoustic panels terminated loosed a wall of dirt that collapsed around him, the musty earth hissing like a chorus of snakes and burying him up to his waist as dust clouds billowed into his face.
