Crossing the Line (4 page)

THREE

T
hese are our operational rules, gentlemen,” Mary announced.

She’d asked my brother to come in from the porch and then assembled us around one of the picnic tables. The table’s rough surface was already cluttered with expanding files and a pair of laptop computers. She was standing at the end as if to deliver a lecture.

“We aren’t going to take any unnecessary chances here. Stay off the ridges around the camp, and out of sight during the day if you hear a plane overhead. We’ll use only our encrypted satellite phone, and you’ll use it only with Tom or me monitoring. We don’t want to risk being overheard—the bad guys have started using some pretty advanced technology. They have radio scanners and some equipment that can intercept both hard-line and cellular calls. The same goes for e-mail once we get the computers set up. No one will leave the property without checking with me first. Please don’t use any lights at night other than in this cabin. We’re to be invisible here. No one’s to know this camp is occupied, especially not by us.”

Her white blouse was streaked with dirt and her hair was half in her face. I liked her better this way, dirty rather than clean. I noticed that she didn’t wear a wedding ring or jewelry of any kind. She looked too young, too small, to be giving orders to the three of us—she couldn’t be more than thirty years old and she couldn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds. Yet her voice was confident, and she was acting as if she were speaking to a packed room of eager agents rather than just her resentful partner, a semi-disgraced state cop, and a drug-addicted felon.

“Am I forgetting anything, gentlemen?”

“Keep your badges shined up and the toilet seat down?” Roberto suggested.

Mary’s lips twitched into a tolerant smile. Tom remained stone-faced.

“Where’s the rest of your team?” I asked.

She looked at Tom, then at me.

“This is it, Agent Burns. The four of us. If we had any more people here, we would be too conspicuous. That’s where we’ve failed in the past.”

I knew something about the failures, despite not knowing much more than the legends about Jesús Hidalgo. For ten years he’d been responsible for a good portion of the almost thirty billion dollars in narcotics coming into the States across the Mexican border each year. For ten years the Feds had failed to get an indictment against him, much less an arrest or conviction. There were Mexican folk songs about Hidalgo,
narcocorridos
of polkas or waltzes, that lionized his ability to make fools of the American authorities.

“So exactly what is it we’re doing here that would be too conspicuous with more people?”

I’d assumed, ever since the FBI requested my assistance a week earlier, that my brother would simply be giving up information about Hidalgo in return for the dismissal of the escape charges in Colorado. And some time in a locked rehab facility, of course. My job would be to help pull the information out of him and keep him under control. My office and I hadn’t known that Jesús Hidalgo was even in my state, much less that the Feds would be taking my brother and me to the vicinity. And I was surprised by the equipment I’d helped lug into the main cabin—it was surveillance stuff, not just tape recorders and video cameras. Some weapons, too, I guessed, were in those locked steel suitcases.

“I’ll get to that. But in short, we’re going to arrest Hidalgo. Right here in Wyoming.”

“Well, you’d better have some more guys when it comes to that,” I laughed, not thinking she was serious. But she looked serious. “He’s bound to have bodyguards, right? A lot of them, I bet.”

Sicarios,
they were called. A respectable drug lord never went anywhere without at least a handful.

Mary nodded. “He does. And we will. But first let’s get some things out of the way.”

She had planned this lecture out carefully, I realized, and knew exactly how she wanted it done. She might as well have had cheat notes in her hand.

“First, because for the next few weeks we’ll be living in close proximity, I want to tell you a little bit about me and Tom and what our roles are here.”

She told us that she had a law degree from American University and a master’s in criminal justice from John Jay. She went on to say that she’d been with the Bureau for five years, and I figured that they must have been prodigious ones, because she was really young to be in charge of a case like this. Two years ago she had been assigned to the Bureau’s San Diego office for the purpose of investigating the Baja cartels in conjunction with the DEA and the Mexican Attorney General’s Office. Her job now, she said, would be to supervise our investigation as well as liaison with the prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

All this, I thought as she spoke, was
not
to tell us anything about her, but instead to formalize her. To let us know that she didn’t want Roberto or me to know anything about her other than her professional résumé. A wall was being very deliberately erected.

She indicated Tom, her partner, with a nod of her head. He was listening to her with his arms folded across his chest.

“Tom has been with that same task force for five years. Prior to that, he worked in El Paso and Juárez. There he worked to secure indictments against Amado Carrillo-Fuentes, the head of the Juárez cartel, who you may have heard of, and the men and women he employed. Carrillo was known as the Lord of the Skies because of the fleet of passenger jets he used to bring cocaine into our country. Tom was also able to get indictments against several of his lieutenants, two of whom were brought in the backseat of his personal vehicle into the United States, where they were arrested.”

I’d heard about that. It had caused an international stink several years ago when the two Mexican nationals were more or less kidnapped from the streets of Juárez then driven across the bridge to El Paso, where they were arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed. The Mexican government had been furious. So had been many American legislators. While Tom was completely lacking in social graces, I had to admit that he had balls.

Mary continued: “Tom went to school at Rutgers in New Jersey and spent two years with the New Jersey State Police, and another two with the DEA, before joining the Bureau. Tom is going to be in charge of the operational end of things.”

No advanced educational degrees for Tom. He must not have any, which didn’t really mean anything anyway for a cop. Not when it came to ability. But I guessed it was why Mary had been able to countermand him and give Roberto and me time to stop and do a little climbing. It also explained his slightly hostile attitude toward Mary giving him orders. A law degree would go a long way in a place like the Bureau. And it could create a lot of resentment.

I was suitably impressed, though, with his accomplishments in El Paso and Juárez, which were almost as bad and dangerous a posting as Tijuana or Mexicali. Clearly the guy was experienced. And Carrillo had been a bad guy on nearly the same level as Hidalgo before he had died: I’d read about him in
The New York Times.
The two had been rivals for a couple of years, Carrillo heading the Juárez cartel and Hidalgo the Mexicali Mafia. The narco from Juárez—worth billions of dollars, and made nervous by the kidnapping and arrest of the two lieutenants—had accidently died while undergoing plastic surgery and liposuction in Mexico City. But his face was a mass of ham-handed stitches—it seemed unlikely real doctors would have committed such butchery. It was rumored that his enemy, Hidalgo, had been one of the masked “surgeons.” If Tom ever dropped his tough-guy act, I intended to ask him about it.

Now Mary looked at my brother. I realized she was going to introduce him, too. As if she and Tom hadn’t already read everything in his files, as if I weren’t his brother. I wondered if she had a file on Mungo.

“You never attended college, did you, Roberto?”

“Nope. I’m a little dumb,” he answered, his slightly slurred voice registering amusement at what was obviously a setup.

Mary delivered it. “But a graduate of the Colorado Bureau of Prisons and the federal penitentiary all the same.”

Roberto smiled for her and exhaled a polite laugh while I tried not to roll my eyes.

She went on. “One conviction for manslaughter, three for felony assault, two for disorderly conduct, one for assault on a peace officer, and one federal conviction for the destruction of communications equipment. Is that right?”

“Bastards shouldn’t have taken so long to put in my phone.”

Mary actually smiled at this. It was the first real smile I’d seen break across her face. She had his file in her hand—she picked it up off the table while she was talking—so she had to know that it wasn’t a joke. It really was the reason he’d taken a chain saw to six miles of telephone poles.

Tom, of course, only snorted with contempt.

Then Mary made clear her reason for reciting Roberto’s criminal history.

“Currently wanted for escape in Colorado, with nationwide warrants out and extradition to be sought from all treaty nations. And a Justice Department authorization to remove him from noncooperating nations by whatever means necessary.”

In other words, they owned him as long as he cared about not having to watch his back for the rest of his life.

Mary now looked at me, saying, “Over the last two weeks your brother has been kind enough to provide us with some very useful background on Hidalgo. He knows more about our target’s methods of operation than anyone we’ve yet been able to, uh, interview.”

I wanted to say something, to object, but I didn’t yet know what I should be objecting to. I just had the feeling that she was trying to sell me something with all this. Everything she said felt so carefully scripted.

She started in on me before I could get anything out. Introducing me to Roberto and Tom now, like we’d never met.

“Special Agent Antonio Burns of the Wyoming Bureau of Investigation—you prefer Anton, right?”

“Yeah.”

She had a file on me, too. It was a manila folder expanded to nearly three inches wide from the morass of well-thumbed documents within. Newspaper clippings as well, I could see. A fat rubber band kept it from exploding in her hands. As she had with Roberto, she now talked about me without referring to it other than to simply hold it. Like she was holding my soul or something.

“Anton also has a master’s in criminal justice, from the University of Colorado. He has been a narcotics officer with the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation for eight years, primarily working undercover. He has been involved in some very colorful cases.”

“Colorful,” Tom said, speaking slowly and deliberately. “If your favorite color is red. I know all I want to know about
you
. I had to work with assholes like you in Mexico.”

Time seemed to stall. A silence that lasted several seconds dropped over us. I could feel my brother’s blue eyes on me, asking,
What you gonna do, Ant?

I leaned across the table. “What have you heard about me, Tom?”

And I immediately wished I hadn’t.

Tom leaned across, too, as if to meet my aggressive posture head-on. He didn’t hesitate this time, the way he had earlier when he’d tried to put Roberto in his place. I had the feeling I didn’t make him nearly as nervous as my brother did.

“That two and a half years ago you killed three men in cold blood. That they call you QuickDraw around here because you’d rather pull a trigger than make arrests. That you’ve been investigated for—”

“Tom!” Mary said sharply. “We’ve been over this. The shooting was ruled justifiable. Anton was exonerated—”

“By his own office. A bunch of hick cowboys. No one with any real investigative experience. We looked at their reports—and they were a total whitewash. Complete bullshit. They just took his word for it.”

I wondered how many times that night in Cheyenne was going to come back to haunt me. At one point in my life I’d been ready to beat the crap out of anyone who repeated the scornful nickname. It had been invented by a newspaper columnist whose son I’d once arrested for selling ecstasy. But now I felt very little. Not even the righteous indignation I tried to put in my posture and gaze. Just weariness. And the growing suspicion that for some reason the two federal agents were putting on a show.

“Tom, we’ve been over it. Our superiors have been over it. The U.S. Attorney’s been over it. It was decided that we could work with Agent Burns and his brother. Now, if you don’t want to be a part of this, just say so right now and we’ll get someone else in here to take your place.”

Tom glared at her briefly then snorted.

“Not likely,” he said. He didn’t elaborate.

Instead he lit a Marlboro with a hard snap of a silver lighter and blew the smoke in her direction. I’d been watching him smoke them all day in the rearview mirror as he tailgated me, then watched him flick them out into the desert.

I thought it was interesting that Mary didn’t contradict his statement. Surely there were hundreds, if not thousands, of agents who would love to be in on taking down a guy the size of Jesús Hidalgo. Who would love to avenge their murdered colleague. As much as I disliked the uptight Feds, no one could accuse the individual agents of ever being cowardly.

But Mary just fanned the smoke away. Her expression was neutral, sphinxlike, but as she stared at Tom, I thought I could see a dark spot of anger on each of her cheeks. Maybe he had stepped beyond their script, if they had one, or taken it a little too far. I wondered what was between them. What were they really up to, playing this game.

“All right, then,” Mary said, her coffee-brown eyes barely visible between her heavy lids. “Tonight we’ll finish unpacking the gear and setting up a surveillance point on the ridge. Tomorrow we’ll start the surveillance. Tom, why don’t you give us a briefing on our location here.”

With sharp, curt gestures intended to display his annoyance, he unzipped a nylon briefcase and took out a large piece of paper. Unfolded on the table, it proved to be a color photograph of the area in the daylight. He spoke through the cigarette clenched in his teeth.