Bio-Strike

All he had taken were a couple, three hairs.

Since Brazil, he’d gotten very good at rationalizing away his transgressions.

FOUR

BAJA PENINSULA, MEXICO OCTOBER 31, 2001

The tunnel was about ten feet deep and ran for two miles toward the United States under the sage-brush desert midway between Tijuana and Mexicali. Its southern opening was accessible through a trapdoor in the rear of a barnyard storage shed. Its northern opening was a small cleft in the hillside at the bottom of an arroyo within eyeshot of the California border. The old tales said it had been dug by Jesuit priests wishing to secrete away a portion of their abundant wealth — al — leged to have been gathered through outlawed trade with pirates and Manila galleons — when the jealous Spanish crown ordered its confiscation in 1767. Over 230 years later, it remained a busy conduit for smuggling operations, although the clandestine traffic was now in narcotics and illegal immigrants bound for America. “The occasion makes the thief,” went the Mexican saying.

Tonight, some thirty yards from the tunnel’s northern entrance, two stripped-down, lightweight all-terrain vehicles and a dusty old Chevrolet pickup sat hidden from Border Patrol agents by a carefully arranged screen of manzanita and chamiso. The truck’s windshield had been blown out, and broken glass was sprayed all over the hood and interior. Both men inside were dead, slumped backward in their seats, the woven upholstery soaked with blood and chewed to ragged scraps by the fusillade of bullets that had passed through and around their flesh. Their pants were drawn down over their ankles, their severed genitals stuffed into their gaping mouths. Each of the lifeless ATV drivers had been shot, mutilated, and left sitting in an identical fashion.

Above the blind of shrubbery that surrounded the vehicles, a dozen men were positioned on sandstone ledges along the east and west walls of the gulch, the four-by-fours in which they had arrived from Tijuana parked at a distance. They carried Mendoza bullpup submachine guns with tritium dot sights and lamp attachments. On the outcropping nearest the tunnel mouth was a wiry, dark-skinned young man with a neat little chin beard and coal- colored hair swept straight back from his forehead. He stood flattened against the slope in a toss of shadows cast by the dim light of a quarter moon. Beside him on the rock shelf was a can-shaped metal object with a thin telescoping antenna on top. His weapon against the leg of his blue jeans, he studied the tunnel mouth from his elevated vantage, not suspecting that he, too, was being observed.

Higher up the arroyo’s western slope, Lathrop crouched behind a wide slab of rimrock, his mouth slightly open, his upper lip curled back, almost seeming to sniff the air as he watched the men below with intense fixation. It was an attitude queerly resembling the flehmen reaction in cats — the detection of airborne trace molecules with the Jacobson’s organ, a tiny, exceedingly acute sensory receptor in the roof of the mouth that, like the tailbone, remains vestigial in humans, and whose function is something between smell and taste, endowing the feline with what is often taken for a sixth sense.

Lathrop had held an affinity for cats since childhood, was fascinated by their ways, owned three of them even now — though this was in all probability nothing but coincidence with regard to his own flehmen, of which he was altogether unconscious.

Calm, motionless, wholly focused in on his surveillance of those below, Lathrop watched from his solitary position of concealment. His face was daubed with camouflage cream. He had on lightweight black fatigues and tactical webbing with a.40 caliber Beretta in a hip holster. Lying beside him on the ground was his SIG-Sauer SSG 2000 sniper rifle. The firearms had been brought only as a precaution. If he were forced to use either of them, it would mean he’d botched the whole setup.

Peering into the eyepiece of his miniature DVD camcorder, Lathrop switched it to photo mode and made a minor adjustment to the night-vision scope coupled to its lens.

He’d have a lot of extra material on disk before he was finished, but better that than to take the chance of missing something important. Anyway, whatever was nonessential could be edited out when he input the digital images to the wallet-sized computer on his belt.

“Okay, Felix, let’s do it with feeling,” Lathrop whispered under his breath.

He zoomed in tightly on the bearded man and pressed the Record button.

Guillermo hated going into the hole. Hated entering a shed piled with swine feed to lower himself onto a precarious wooden staircase that creaked, swayed, and buckled with each downward step. Hated the stifling heat inside by day, the miserable cold by night. Hated the low roof pressing down overhead, forcing the tallest men to stoop as they walked. Hated the close dirt walls, crudely shored up in places with wood and concrete but still looking as if they might collapse around him without warning. Hated the skitter of rodents and insects in darkness so thick you could almost feel it pouring over your skin, smothering you like black sludge. Perhaps more than anything else, though, he hated the fetid odor of sweat, unwashed clothing, and bodily wastes that permeated the narrow tunnel despite the swamp coolers used to pull fresh air through ventilation shafts along its entire length.

He hated going into the hole, yes, hated every moment of every passage he’d made through its cramped, stinking twists and turns, but he knew with an absolute certainty that without it he’d never have lasted a decade, more than a decade, in an occupation that had put many behind prison bars in a fraction of that time. It was because of the hole that he’d had unmatched success at eluding the border patrols, because of the advantage it gave him over the competition that the Salazar brothers had turned an ever-increasing volume and diversity of trade his way. There were dozens of coyotes on the peninsula to whom Los Reyes Magos de Tijuana granted their blessing and protection, but Guillermo was sure that none besides himself would have been entrusted with this latest bulk shipment, sixty kilograms of high-quality black-tar heroin, worth a fortune on the norteamericano wholesale market. And while the job was far riskier than others he’d carried out for them in the past, it was also less work than having to hustle together enough people who could afford his thousand-dollar-per-head fee to make a border crossing worth the trouble. Most often he was booking agent and conductor rolled into one. Tonight, the train had been filled prior to his involvement, and he had merely to bring it up to the line to receive his payment from Lucio Salazar.

Un coyote, si, Guillermo thought reflectively. This was the popular label for a smuggler of human beings and contraband, and he was well aware not all its connotations were flattering. Fast, canny, and dangerous, wise to the lay of the land, the creature was also an opportunist that scavenged its meals wherever and however it could. Si, si, why take shame in it? The environment Guillermo inhabited tolerated moralists poorly, and he much preferred survival to becoming a righteous casualty.

His flashlight shining into the gloom now, he moved through the tunnel ahead of the Indians who had back- packed the heroin from Sonoma — thirty-five villagers by his hasty count, none older than twenty, most teenagers, perhaps a third of them girls — the youthful couriers themselves followed at gunpoint by a half dozen of the Salazars’ forzadores, their enforcers. It made for, what, fifty people, give or take, double the number he’d brought down with him on any previous run, easily double. Madre Dios, he hoped these walls could withstand the tread of all those feet.

Imagined or not, the increased danger of a cave-in during this particular run only worsened Guillermo’s usual state of unease. As, he supposed, did the rifles being leveled at the ninas. One of them in particular, a pretty fourteen- or fifteen-year-old, had reminded him of his own angelic daughter, who was about her age and had hair that was the same length, that even fell over her forehead in an uncannily similar way… though he wasn’t willing to let their resemblance lead him to any exaggerated assumptions. The government was fond of propagandizing that the Salazars had turned remote villages in the Gran Desierto and further south across the Sierra Madres into armed camps and sources of slave labor. But why did that portrayal make no mention of the abominable conditions that the inhabitants had endured before their “occupation,” of families starving in shelters pieced together from the remnants of cardboard boxes until the Salazars arrived and replaced them with permanent dwellings? Which alternative left them better off? Guillermo didn’t know, hadn’t enough information to form a balanced opinion, and at any rate, it was truly none of his affair. The train was not his. He had only to mind his business and guide it along toward Estacion Lucio, as it were. And collect.

Guillermo rounded an abrupt bend in the path, widening the variable focus of his flashlight. It revealed