He picked up his iPad from the bedside table, flipped open the cover and tapped the icon to bring up his e-reader app. Cuchillo, of course, generally preferred traditional books for the most part. But he was a man of the 21st century and found e-books were often more convenient and easier to read than their paper forebears. His iPad library contained nearly a thousand titles.
As he looked at the tablet, though, he realized he must have hit the wrong app icon-the forward camera had opened and he found he was staring at himself.
Cuchillo didn’t close the camera right away, however. He took a moment to regard himself. And laughed and whispered the phrase he’d used to describe himself earlier, “Not so bad, you old devil.”
Five hundred yards from Cuchillo’s compound, Alejo Díaz and P.Z. Evans were sitting in the front seat of the big Mercury. They were leaning forward, staring at the screen of Evans’s impressive laptop computer.
What they were observing was the same image that Cuchillo happened to be basking in-his own wide-angle face-which was being beamed from his iPad’s camera to the laptop via a surveillance app that Evans had loaded. They could hear the man’s voice too.
You old devil…
“He’s in bed, alone,” Evans said. “Good enough for me.” Then he glanced at Díaz. “He’s all yours.”
“Sí?” asked the Mexican agent.
“Yep.”
“Gracias.”
“Nada.”
And without any dramatic flair, Díaz pressed a button on what looked like a garage door opener.
In Cuchillo’s bedroom, the iPad’s leather case, which Evans had stuffed with the potent incendiary explosive last night, detonated. The explosion was far larger than the American agent had expected. Even the bullet-proof windows blew to splinters and a gaseous cloud of flame shot into the night.
They waited until it was clear the bedroom was engulfed in flame-and all the evidence of the attack was burning to vapors, as they’d been instructed to do by Washington-and then Díaz started the car and drove slowly through the night.
After ten minutes of silence, looking over their shoulders for police or other pursuers, Díaz said, “Have to say, amigo, you came up with a good plan.”
Evans didn’t gloat-or act shy with false modesty, either. It was a good plan. Data-mining had revealed a lot about Cuchillo (this was often true in the case of targets like him-wealthy and, accordingly, big spenders). Evans and Díaz had noted not only his purchases of collectable books, but his high-tech acquisitions too: an iPad, an e-reader app and a number of e-books, as well as a leather case for the Apple device.
Armed with this information, Evans duplicated the iPad and filled the case with the deadly explosive. This was the actual weapon that Díaz smuggled into the compound and swapped with Cuchillo’s iPad, whose location they could pinpoint thanks to the finder service Evans had hacked into.With Díaz inside, holding the iPad to show Davila’s latest inventory of books, Evans had fired into the windows, scattering everyone and giving his partner a chance to slip into the bedroom and switch the devices. He’d fired into that room’s windows, too, just in case Díaz had not been alone there.
The bullets would also serve a second purpose-to let Cuchillo and his security people believe the shooting was the assault they’d heard about and lessen their suspicion that another attack was coming.
Lessen, but not eliminate. The Knife was too sharp for that.
And so they needed a second misdirection. Evans let slip fake information about himself-to Carmella, the beautiful woman who was part of Cuchillo’s entourage at Ruby’s Bar (phone records revealed he called her once or twice a month). He also fed phony data-mined facts that suggested he and Díaz might have snuck a bomb into the library. He’d hollowed out a copy of Schiller’s The Robbers-Sorry, Fred-and filled it with real explosives and a circuit, but failed to connect the detonators.
Cuchillo would know his library so well it wouldn’t take much to find this out-of-place volume, which Díaz had intentionally planted askew.
After finding this device, they would surely think no more threats existed and not suspect the deadly iPad on Cuchillo’s bedside table.
Díaz now called José, the security chief for the late drug baron, and explained-in a loud voice due to the chief’s sudden hearing loss-that if any bus attacks occurred he would end up in jail accompanied by the rumor that he had sold his boss out. As unpopular as Cuchillo had been among the competing cartel figures, nothing was more unpopular in a Mexican prison than a snitch.
The man assured them that there would be no attacks. Díaz had to say goodbye three times before the man heard him.
A good plan, if a bit complicated. It would have been much easier, of course, simply to get a real bomb into the library and detonate it when drone surveillance revealed Cuchillo inside.
That idea, however, hadn’t even been on the table. They would never have destroyed the library. Aside from the moral issue-and P.Z. Evans did have his standards-there was the little matter of how such a conflagration would play in the press if word got out about the identity of the two agents who’d orchestrated it and who their employers were.
You can kill drug barons and their henchmen with impunity; 20,000 destroyed classics were not acceptable sacrifices. That was the sort of mar from which careers do not recover.
In a half hour they were back at the hotel and watching the news, which confirmed that indeed Alonso María Carillo, known as Cuchillo, the suspected head of the Hermosillo Cartel, was dead. No one else had been injured in the attack, which was blamed on a rival cartel, probably from Sinaloa.
The news, Evans was surprised to note, wasn’t the lead story, which Cuchillo probably would have taken hard. But, in a way, it was his own fault; he’d contributed to the ubiquity of the drug business in Mexico, which made stories about death in the trade unnewsworthy.
Evans supposed it was something like book collecting: the bigger the print run for first editions, the less the interest, the lower the value.
He shut the set off. They decided to get a little dinner and a lot of tequila-though definitely not at Sonora Steak or Ruby’s bar, Cuchillo’s favorite hangouts. They’d go somewhere across town. They’d probably be safe; the Hermosillo Cartel had been neutralized. Still, both men had their weapons underneath their untucked shirts. And extra magazines in their left pockets.
As they walked to the big old Mercury, Díaz said, “You should have seen all those books in the library. I never saw so many books in my life.”
“Uhn,” Evans said, not particularly interested.
“What does that mean, that sound? You don’t like books?”
“I like books.”
The Mexican agent gave a fast laugh. “You no sound like you do. You read at all?”
“Of course I read.”
“So, what do you read? Tell me.”
Evans climbed into the passenger seat and counted three pickup trucks pass by before he answered. “Okay, you want to know? The sports section. That’s all I read.”
Díaz started the car. “Sí, me too.”
Evans said, “Could we get that A.C. going, Al? Does it ever cool off in this goddamn town?
Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver is the New York Times bestselling author of nineteen suspense novels, including The Blue Nowhere and The Bone Collector. He has been nominated for three Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America and is a two-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year. Mr. Deaver lives in California and Virginia.