Between Two Scorpions Read online

  Reassured, Alec reached for Katrina’s hand. She opened her eyes, startled.

  “Thank you,” Alec whispered.

  Her look softened—perhaps one iota. He leaned over and whispered in her ear. “You’re amazing.”

  She looked out the window.

  “It’s not like I grew up dreaming of being really good at killing people,” she said firmly.

  Alec nodded in understanding and looked out his own window.

  A moment later, he couldn’t help himself.

  He leaned over and whispered in her ear, “But you were so awesome!” This made Katrina laugh. “Better to be really good at this and alive than really bad and dead.”

  “I suppose,” she said, shaking her head. “Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.”

  Alec leaned forward. “Ward, you had to see this! There were like, six of them—”

  “Alec!” Katrina said, laughing a little.

  “Six of them, and Katrina just pop pop pop—like Annie Oakley, Lara Croft, and Princess Leia rolled into one!” Alec gushed. “Each one comes up, click-chick BOOM. Dust, bitten. Farm, bought. Pining for the fjords!”

  Ward smiled. “I’d expect nothing less!”

  “Don’t encourage him!” Katrina fumed. She was having a perfectly good moment of angst disrupted by Alec’s joy at having survived the gunfight.

  “I don’t even think—did you even miss? Do you have, like, magic bullets that just go around corners?” Alec continued, now venting his jealousy a bit. “I think I hit a door. You hit six of them, with, like, four bullets somehow, and I hit a door. I’m the one who should be in a bad mood!”

  Katrina shook her head. “Yes, I missed.” Alec stared at her skeptically. “Three times. Out of eighteen shots.”

  Ward laughed from the front seat. Katrina continued to shake her head, trying to not smile or laugh at the absurdity of trying to sound modest. “And Alec?”

  He stared back.

  “I didn’t hit six of them, I hit seven,” she corrected. Alec and Ward roared with laughter.

  CHAPTER 33

  MEXICO CITY

  THURSDAY, MARCH 25

  At the CIA station in Mexico City, everything recovered from Jaguar’s apartment was photographed, documented, and prepared to be securely sent back to Langley; it was unlikely to provide a lot more than Dee’s electronic ransacking of Jaguar’s home computer, but experience taught everyone to be thorough. Alec, Katrina, and Ward got in late, and slept late.

  By midmorning the station chief strongly urged them to be on the next flight back to Washington.

  The Mexico City police had no idea who shot up the Calaveras gang, killing five and seriously wounding two others, but even in a city with horrific rates of violent crime, a mass shooting in a luxury condominium stood out. Even the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional perked their ears up at word that an Anglo man believed to be American was seen entering before the shooting started. The fact that all of the security cameras in the building had simultaneously failed and some sort of hacking had wrecked the operating system only made the investigating detectives more curious.

  But no forensic technician would ever match the rounds from the gunfight to the Americans’ SIG Sauers; they were permanently relocated to the embassy furnace.

  The Mexico City police were used to uncooperative witnesses. They would go through the motions, knowing that the real investigation would be conducted by the men of Los Craneos, the “brother gang” to the all-women Calaveras. The men swore vengeance; glasses of tequila were poured on the floor. The more driven Craneos knocked on the doors of Jaguar’s neighbors, demanding answers. The terrified neighbors told the gang members that when they heard the first shots, they hit the floor.

  On the other side of the city, Jaguar stewed, sitting on a bed in his own safe house, with a terrified Esmerelda lying on the bed beside him. She had been there when the ambulances arrived; she had seen her sisters taken to the hospital. Two might pull through. The Craneos were on the warpath, demanding answers, and while they didn’t know of Jaguar’s particular hideaway down a back alley in Tepito, he couldn’t spend the rest of his life hiding.

  How could he explain to the gang that he had inadvertently brought all this trouble to their door, with five of the gang’s women dead and two more hanging on the edge? Somehow it would have been easier to explain, easier to forget if it had been just another bloody turf battle between gangs or rival cartels. But those were fought in the streets, not in the hallways of luxury condos. Two assailants—mostly one woman, from Esmerelda’s account—wiping out a good chunk of a gang in one night?

  But to tell the Craneos, “lo siento, mis amigos, my work for this mysterious patron living in Turkmenistan brought the CIA to your door”—well, there was an excellent chance the Craneos would kill him out of misplaced rage. Or Esmerelda.

  A man and a woman … Jaguar contemplated that unusual detail from the shooting. There were a handful women in Mexico capable of such ruthlessness in a fight, accurate enough with a gun to cut through the Calaveras and walk away unscathed. “La China,” an infamous woman assassin, had killed 150 people in a ten-year span for the Damasco cartel in Baja California. She had been arrested way back in 2015, but it was plausible—even likely?—that she had some protégé or someone as good as she was.

  Jaguar picked up one of his burner phones and called the demonic thug who was the Craneos’ boss de la dia.

  “It’s Jaguar,” he spoke, not waiting for a reply. “I’ve been working all my sources the moment I heard. Do you think the Damasco cartel would come after you? This matches their old methods.”

  That grain of suspicion was all Jaguar needed to plant in the gang’s collective mind. Within an hour, and with a half-dozen additional calls, the Craneos had convinced themselves that the Damasco cartel, who had never respected them, were audaciously attempting to break into the Mexico City territory. Even worse, their opening move had been ruthless, reckless, and personal. A new cartel war was underway.

  “The Damascos will never see our counterattack coming,” a Craneo boasted to Jaguar.

  Indeed, because they have no idea I’m using them as the scapegoat, Jaguar thought.

  He hung up the phone after the last call. He turned to find Esmerelda in the other room, blowing marijuana smoke to the small statuette of Santa Muerte she had installed. She poured a complete small bottle of tequila at the feet of the statue.

  Esmerelda turned and gave Jaguar a relieved smile. “I told you she would protect us if we were loyal.”

  Jaguar nodded and repressed all of his theological objections to his love’s devotion to Saint Death, the twisted occult folk saint that the Catholic Church abhorred.

  Only when she settled into the bed did Jaguar let himself silently roll his eyes at her rituals. If only she would put aside these silly superstitions and accept a real deity, like Tezcatlipoca.

  “We’ll have to disappear for a while,” Jaguar said. “We’ll go to San Miguel.” He had always enjoyed his visits to the picturesque mountain town, full of artists and American expats. Life would be quieter there; he had enough cash reserves to live off the grid for a long, long while.

  He curled up and let his hand settle on Esmerelda’s bottom and smiled. A long, long while with nothing to do but her.

  ***

  Once the commercial jetliner from Mexico City to Dulles International Airport passed into American airspace, Alec exhaled … and smiled. He noticed Katrina didn’t share his good spirits and nudged her.

  “Cold trail,” she mumbled.

  “Just for now,” Alec said confidently. “We’ll get these guys. We’re at ten thousand feet. Soon enough we’ll put them six feet under.”

  Katrina shook her head. “There’s no pride in … doing that. You and Ward take a necessary evil of our work and forget that it’s an evil.”

  “I’ll work on that, as long as you don’t forget that it can be necessary,” Alec shrugged. “It’s the bus
iness we’re in.”

  “No, we’re in the information business,” Katrina said firmly.

  “Are we?” Alec asked. He sipped his drink. “I’d say we’re in the consequence business. Bad people do bad things because they think they can get away with it, and we show up at their door, demonstrating the consequences.”

  Katrina pursed her lips. “Judge, jury, and executioner?”

  “We don’t go around looking for trouble. We are a reaction. Don’t start none, won’t be none.”

  Ward leaned in, uninvited, from across the aisle. “Did you ever think that maybe the world would be a little better place—a calmer, more respectful, more peaceful place—if everybody was a little more concerned about return fire?” he asked quietly. “An armed society is a polite society. That makes us Miss Manners with laser sights.”

  Alec gave an approving nod. Katrina was unimpressed.

  “It’s not like we come up behind guys when they’re standing at the urinal!” Alec objected in an offended whisper. “When these guys decide to go out guns blazing, it’s not our fault!”

  “Of course,” Katrina said. “Neither of you would walk up to a man and shoot him without warning. That violates Ward’s sense of honor and your self-image as a Christian. You both think of yourself as the good guys. But deliberately provoking a man into a gunfight you know he’ll lose—you guys are fine with that. That way you can look in the mirror and tell yourself that he made the choice, not you.”

  Katrina could tell from Alec’s eyes she had hit a bull’s-eye once again.

  “Those of us who think our purpose is to obtain information want these guys alive, so they can talk. Sources, moles, defectors—there was a time when that was our bread and butter. The whole point was to learn secrets, to inform policymakers, to help make a safer world. Three straight presidencies now, work becomes more paramilitary ops, more drone strikes, more of your so-called consequences.” She looked out the window. “How sure are you that it’s really making everything safer out there?”

  Alec stared ahead, offended.

  “I didn’t make this world,” he said. “I’m just trying to fix it.”

  CHAPTER 34

  March

  To: Raquel Holtz,

  From: Merlin

  Tsk-tsk, Raquel, what kind of kids are they hiring at Langley these days? It took barely a day of working contacts and favor-trading to find the attached police reports attributing various cartel-related deaths and disappearances to “The Jaguar.” They do know the difference between “killed by a jaguar” and “killed by ‘the Jaguar,’” right?

  A lot of Mexico’s most notorious assassins operate under a nom de guerre—El Sicario (The Hitman), El Sangres (The Blood), El Ponchis (The Cloak), El Nino (The Boy), and Los Antrax (The Anthrax).

  I’m not entirely surprised about the trail leading through Mexico. Back when I was in a position to do something about it all, our neighbor to the south worried me.

  In American eyes, Mexico is the land of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, El Dorado’s cities of gold, land of Zorro, the Magnificent Seven. It’s the place where the food is magic, as in Like Water for Chocolate; tequila’s a magic potion that makes you take leave of your senses. (Does it put a mask on you and change your identity? Or does it take the mask off, and reveal what’s always been underneath?) Mexico’s the land just beyond the border where you can break rules you wouldn’t break at home. If America’s really xenophobic, it’s the peculiar kind of xenophobia that drives us to put everything in a burrito and get smashed on margaritas on Cinco de Mayo.

  But there’s always been this fearful undercurrent in the way America sees Mexico: the beautiful curse at the heart of Steinbeck’s The Pearl, D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, Orson Welles’ corrupt small-town police captain in Touch of Evil, the unstoppable hit man in No Country for Old Men, the Aztec Temple hidden underneath a truck stop in From Dusk Till Dawn. (My grand-nephew made me watch that one.) Montezuma’s revenge is always lurking out there. The danger has always been there, and the locals just live with it; luxurious Mexican homes feature interior courtyards, not front lawns. Sturdy, protective walls face the street. The danger comes from outside: from the slums, the jungles, the deserts, the mountains. Go too far and there’s no law that can protect you. To live comfortably and safely is to live in sealed-off enclaves; the rest of the country is conceded to … it. The dark.

  What happens if you mix the worst of America with the worst of Mexico? What if the interaction between both sides of the border begat both the beautiful and, separately, something darker, twisted, curdled? (I’m not just talking about the goat-sucking Chupacabra urban legend.)

  D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, written in 1926, gets dismissed as fascist, and it has more than a little Kipling-ish “white man’s burden, oh, look at these silly natives, careful, those godless savages will seduce your white woman with their sensual voodoo” vibe to it. But the subtext isn’t that hard to pick up: that something malevolent and bloodthirsty still stirred in this land, quenched for centuries by human hearts and ritual sacrifice of children, and whatever setback it endured with the arrival of Cortés, it was still lurking beneath Mexico’s surface, searching for the chance to break through into a rational, scientific modern world that long ago gave up its capacity to understand it.

  I looked up something about Lawrence; he did this big tour of Mexico, hitting all the Aztec ruins and the floating gardens at Xochimilco before writing that novel. His traveling companion, the poet Witter Bynner, wrote:

  In the great quadrangle of Quetzalcoatl, we saw Lawrence stand looking and brooding. The coloured stone heads of the feathered snakes in one of the temples were a match for him. The stone serpents and owls held something that he obviously feared.

  Now, as far as I know, nobody’s seen a giant feathered serpent running around Mexico devouring the internal organs of hapless sacrifice victims. But not all monsters have scales.

  The American demand for drugs in their myriad forms and the Mexican supply would be the opening that Lawrence’s dark force sought. If you were a malevolent force sustained by ritualistic human sacrifice, wouldn’t a cartel—with a head, a voracious appetite for blood, and claws dug deep into everything—be the perfect form for you? Someone like Francis Neuse would ask if the monsters of legend had adapted to the modern, secular age by simply becoming ethereal influences on human behavior.

  A few years back the Archbishop and Cardinal attempted an exorcism of the whole country in San Luis Potosí. I don’t think it worked yet.

  —Merlin

  CHAPTER 35

  THURSDAY, MARCH 25

  In the early evening hours, Atarsa struck again.

  Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, and Jones died that night, although within a few hours, the misleading nature of Atarsa’s threat was clear. Those were the names of the perpetrators, all of whom were killed that night in the course of their attacks.

  They timed their attacks to begin simultaneously across the country, across different time zones. Calvin Smith, age thirty-one, pulled out a knife and began stabbing anyone he could in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel in the Renaissance Center in Detroit, Michigan. He killed one man and one woman before being shot by a police officer.

  Ezra Johnson did the same at the entrance to the Empire State Building in Manhattan. All six of his victims survived and were stable in local hospitals; an NYPD officer put him down quickly with a shot to the chest.

  Zed Williams walked into the Cartier store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and stabbed the first customer he saw, causing fatal wounds. A store security guard was cut badly while wrestling him to the ground. Moments after police entered, Williams cut his own throat and died shortly thereafter.

  Reginald Brown attempted the same outside Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. A passerby shot him with his firearm after Brown injured four people, two critically.

  Nathaniel Jones picked a hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina, aiming for immobilized, vu
lnerable victims. He killed four people before a hospital security guard shot him. Like Williams, his last act was a slice to his own throat, ensuring he would not speak and betray his cause.

  Having stabbed random victims to death in their houses, Atarsa attempted mass stabbings in crowded public places. All of the perpetrators were men, between the ages of nineteen and thirty-one; Brown was African American, the others were white.

  All of the men, at six p.m. Eastern, three p.m. Pacific, removed common kitchen knives out of their pockets or bags and began stabbing the closest person. The death toll was only seven people, with eleven injured. But that evening, the networks preempted their regular programming for live coverage.

  The wall-to-wall coverage might have seemed excessive except that all of the perpetrators had used GoPro cameras to record video of their attacks, and the footage was uploaded to the Internet as it recorded. Some unknown perpetrators then hacked the Emergency Broadcast System, sending text messages to tens of thousands of Americans: updated government warning on ongoing terror attacks, click here. Upon clicking the link, the phones were redirected to video of the attacks from the perpetrators’ view.

  CHAPTER 36

  Watching a screen above the bar in the Dulles International Terminal upon his return from Mexico, Alec wondered whether Wolf Blitzer was going to need to breathe into a brown paper bag soon.

  “Absolutely horrifying, truly disturbing,” the bearded anchor declared. “We’re warning people not to click on the links if they receive a text from the Emergency Broadcast System. The Department of Homeland Security is saying, emphatically, that they are not sending these texts. Let’s turn to our chief terrorism analyst, to see what he makes of this ghoulish dimension to the attacks—”

  Katrina and Alec watched as the chief terrorism analyst managed to work in a reference to the time he had tea with a long-dead terror mastermind decades earlier.