Triple Crossing

A NOVEL

SEBASTIAN ROTELLA

MULHOLLAND BOOKS

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

NEW YORK    BOSTON    LONDON

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Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Para Carmen, mi amor

And for Valeria, with love

The customary disclaimer is correct: The characters and events herein are fictitious. Any similarities to anyone are coincidental.
Et cetera.

Nonetheless, I am also a journalist. I have spent a long time covering Latin America and the borderlands. So for the benefit
of those who know the turf, and also for those who are discovering it, I want to set the right tone.

This book is inspired by reality. But a novel gives you the liberty to change and blend, mix and match. Many details of the
subcultures of policing and smuggling, of the topography and sociology of the borderlands, are grounded in the present. Others
grow out of a past reality that has since evolved. And some aspects are purely “fictional.”

I hope the result fulfills the mission of a novel as described by the wise Mario Vargas Llosa: “to express a curious truth
that can only be expressed in a concealed way, disguised as something it is not.”

F
OG AT THE BORDER
.

Border Patrol Agent Valentine Pescatore urged the green Jeep Wrangler through the shroud of mist on the southbound road. Hungover
and sleepy, he slurped on a mug of convenience-store Coke. Carbonation burned behind his eyes. He braked into a curve, trailing
a comet of dust. Jackrabbits scattered in his headlights.

Braking sent a twinge of pain through his ankle. He had blown it up months earlier while chasing a hightop-wearing Tijuana
speedster through a canyon. He had intended to snare the hood of the punk’s sweatshirt and jerk him to a neck-wrenching stop,
confirming his status as the fastest trainee in his unit.

But instead Pescatore went down, sprawling pathetically, clutching the ankle with both hands.

Border Patrol agents gathered around him in the darkness. Tejano accents twanged. Cigarettes flared. A cowboy-hatted silhouette
squatted as if contemplating a prisoner or a corpse.

Hell,
muchacho,
time to nominate you for a Einstein award.

Was that a female tonk you were chasing, Valentine? Playing hard to get, eh?

Hey, you’re not gonna catch them all. Slow down. Foot speed don’t impress us anymore.

The voices in his memory gave way to the dispatcher’s voice on the radio, asking his position. Pescatore increased speed,
rolling through the blackness of a field toward the foothills of the Tijuana River valley. With a guilty grimace, he pushed
a CD into the dashboard player. Bass and cymbals blared: The song was a rap version of “Low Rider.”

Another night on the boulevard

Cruisin’ hard

And everybody’s low-ridin’.

The song had become his anthem, his overture when he headed out into the nightly battle theater of the absurd. He grinned
behind the wheel, swaying, mouthing the words. He entered San Ysidro, the last sliver of San Diego before the Tijuana line.
The Wrangler cruised past parking lots for tourists who crossed on foot into Mexico, past discount-clothing outlets for shoppers
who drove up from Mexico. The area was a meeting point for
raiteros
(
raite
was Spanglish for “ride”) waiting to drive north the illegal immigrants who made it through the canyons. He saw figures crouched
among rows of parked cars, but he didn’t slow down. There were already Border Patrol agents, uniformed and plainclothes, creeping
on foot among the cars, waiting for smuggling vehicles to fill up before they pounced. No
raite
tonight, homes. Try again tomorrow.

The restricted federal area near the pedestrian border crossing to Tijuana was illuminated by stadium lights atop steel masts
that ran along The Line toward the Pacific. Past the southeast corner of the lot where a Border Patrol van idled, a crew of
teenagers—boys in Raiders jackets and low-slung baggy pants, girls in shorts and halter tops despite the chill—trooped through
the pedestrian turnstile. The revolving gate made a melodic metallic clatter that reminded him of a calliope or steel drums.
The youths were Tuesday-night partyers bound for what was
left of the Avenida Revolución nightlife district, a casualty of the drug wars lined with shuttered bars and abandoned clubs.
Farther east, a steel river of freeway traffic flowed into the Mexican customs station. Pescatore turned west and drove alongside
the border fence. The rusting barrier had been assembled from metal landing mats once used for temporary air bases: military
castoffs from the Vietnam era. A secondary line of fortification, a newer, taller fence made of see-through steel mesh, gleamed
on his right.

Migrants perched atop the border fence on his left. They bided their time, suspended between nations. They peered down at
him. Their breath steamed in the February night. This stretch was known as Memo Lane because rocks often rained down on Border
Patrol vehicles, forcing agents to write incident memos.

Pescatore blinked and yawned. Back in high school, a wiseass English teacher had had fun with his name. It means “fisherman”
in Italian. And there’s the biblical connotation: fisher of men. Which will it be, Mr. Pescatore? Fisherman or fisher of men?
As it turned out, in a way the Jesuits would not have expected, Pescatore had become a fisher of men. And women and children.
All you can catch. You couldn’t make a net big enough to hold them all. Catch catch catch. And throw them back.

The next song began with the baritone recorded voice that greeted callers to the phone lines of the U.S. immigration bureaucracy.
Then came helicopter sounds, simulated Border Patrol radio traffic, a fast frenetic beat. A rapper ranted about oppression,
Christopher Columbus, migrants on the move. The rapper got all excited accusing the Border Patrol of abuse, rape, murder and
just about everything except drowning Mexican puppies.

Pescatore kind of liked the song; he liked to hate it. It reminded him of the ponytailed Viva La Raza militants who were the
nemeses of every self-respecting PA. The ones who hid in the brush with video cameras waiting for you to break the rules,
who
whined about human rights when an agent defended himself against some drug addict or gang member coming at him out of a mob.
The song reminded him of the Mexican
Migra Asesina
movies in which Snidely Whiplash–looking Border Patrol agents with machine guns mowed down migrants. Quite a twist on reality:
Pescatore had more than once seen aliens, when caught between U.S. agents and Mexican police, run north to surrender.

The words crescendoed into the blast of a shotgun. Throwing his head back in sarcastic euphoria, Pescatore shouted out the
refrain: “Runnin’!”

He switched off the music. He coaxed the Wrangler up an embankment, dust swirling. He rumbled into position at his workstation:
the front line in the never-ending war of the American Foreign Legion, aka the U.S. Border Patrol: the Tijuana River levee.

The landscape never failed to give him the sensation that he had landed on a hostile planet. The levee slanted southeast into
Mexican territory. Billows of fog had come to rest in the riverbed like grounded clouds. The migrants lining the concrete
banks of the levee were wraiths in the fog. The levee was almost dry except for a stream trickling among tufts of vegetation
in the center: a black brew of sewage, industrial toxins, runoff from mountain ranges of garbage in Tijuana shacktowns. Border
vendors sold the migrants plastic garbage bags to pull over their shoes and legs before wading through the muck.

There were dozens of people on the Mexican side. Smoke from bonfires mingled with the haze of dust. The scene gave off an
infernal glow: the flames, the stadium lights, the glimmer of the
colonias
speckling the hills of Tijuana.

The voice of Agent Arleigh Garrison, his supervisor, rumbled over the radio.

“Here we go, Valentine. You finally made it.”

Pescatore fumbled with his radio. “Yessir. Sorry I was late. I had the problem with my radio and everything.”

“Your problem was too many
cervezas
last night at the Hound Dog, son,” Garrison chuckled.

“Yessir.”

“Ready to catch some tonks? Ready to play? I plan on breaking my world record tonight, buddy.”

“Yessir.” Although he had cracked more than one head, Pescatore could not quite bring himself to call the aliens “tonks.”

“Come on over here. I wanna show you something.”

Pescatore pulled up alongside two Wranglers sitting side by side on the north riverbank a few hundred yards away. He got out
to talk to Garrison and an agent named Dillard, a boyish and reedy cowpoke who was telling the supervisor: “Them old boys
wouldn’t pull over, so I cut on my lights and sy-reen.”

And they all rag on me, Pescatore groused to himself, because supposedly I’m the one who talks funny. He caught a glimpse
of his reflection in the window of a vehicle: Pescatore was twenty-five, bantam, built low to the ground with sturdy corded
arms and legs, thick black curls. He had big wary eyes and flared nostrils. He liked to play with his appearance as if he
were on undercover assignments. He cultivated mustaches that made him look like a Turk, a Hells Angel, a bandit. Back in Chicago
before he joined The Patrol, he had on occasion grown out his hair like the Mexican soccer players in the parks near Taylor
Street. But now he was close-cropped and clean-shaven. Trying to tone it down, play the role and, as Garrison would say, get
with the program.

“There’s my buddy,” Garrison said. He engaged Pescatore in a palm-smacking, knuckle-crushing handshake and let it linger with
Pescatore off-balance, as if he were going to yank him forward and shove him down the concrete embankment. “You need anything,
Valentine? Coffee? Water? Oxygen? We wanna keep you awake. Don’t want you running that government vehicle into a tree.”

Pescatore rescued his hand from Garrison’s, which was encased in a black glove, and affected a sheepish look. “Oh man, you
know I’m king of the road anytime. I haven’t been sleeping so good, that’s all.”