“Yo, c’mon, open the fuckin’ thing!”
Cesar nodded without saying anything. He worked the flat end of the steel bar under the trunk lid between the latch and corroded rubber weatherstripping. Then he pushed down on the crowbar with both hands, using his full weight for leverage.
It took very little prying to disengage the trunk’s rusted latch. The lid popped creakily.
The stench that rose with the moist, warm air that had been trapped inside was sickening. Cesar gagged and clapped his palm over his nose and mouth. Then Jorge reached across his chest and pushed the lid open the rest of the way.
They stared into the compartment as another blast of foulness gusted over them.
The corpse was saturated in a reddish stew of blood and other juices. Its clothes were gummy, and the fluids had seeped into the trunk’s lining. Cesar and Jorge saw a pale hand, a bloated stomach under the scrunched-up shirt and jacket.
Two large rats had managed to burrow through to the compartment. They withdrew their smeared, gummy snouts from inside what was left of the skull and squinted out into the bright daylight.
The dead man might not have been recognizable except for his clothes. The same familiar clothes he’d been wearing when they’d last seen him.
Their eyes wide, Cesar and Jorge exchanged a glance of shared incredulity.
Felix Quiros’s whereabouts had been discovered, and Tijuana this sure as hell wasn’t.
Blood for blood. That was how he felt it had to be.
Enrique Quiros sat alone in the San Diego office with the words Golden Triangle Services fronting the outer hallway, his designer glasses folded in his shirt pocket, elbows propped on his desk. He was leaning forward into his hands, eyes closed, the balls of his palms pressed against their lids.
Never in his life had he felt so tired.
It had been an hour since he’d returned from the salvage yard and seen the ghastly remains of his nephew. Dumped inside that trunk. Packed into that trunk with his own blood. And the smell. It seemed to linger in Enrique’s nostrils even now, so strong it was almost a taste at the back of his tongue. In his car driving back downtown, he had found an unopened roll of breath mints and popped one after another into his mouth, chewing each in seconds, crushing them between his teeth. That hadn’t helped. He’d stood by the car just briefly. A minute or less. But he thought the stench of Felix’s decomposing flesh would stay with him for a very long time to come.
Head in hands, he massaged his eyes. On the desktop near his right arm was a small leather case that he had withdrawn from a concealed safe elsewhere in the office suite. Inside it was a plastic ampule and a wrapped, sterile syringe. His reward from El Tío for having relayed a matching kit to Palardy, and a sure means for revenge against the man culpable for his nephew’s death.
Although Enrique was not a scientist, he had a solid layman’s understanding of the incredible biological weapon he’d been given. The clear liquid sealed inside the ampule was a neutral, harmless medium for transport and administration of the microscopic capsules suspended within. But a single drop held a concentration of hundreds, perhaps thousands of microcapsules. And since each of those capsules was a tiny bomblet packed with trigger proteins that would allow the Sleeper virus infecting every human being to “awaken,” that drop would be sufficiently potent to kill the target of an attack many times over. All that was required for the virus to mutate into its lethal form, attach itself to a specific genetic feature, and amplify, was its victim having a sip of water that had been implanted with the trigger, a bite of food… or, Enrique thought darkly, a mint of the sort he’d been crunching down in the car.
And the fluid medium was only one among many methods of getting a trigger into the human body. If your desire was to take out a single individual, you could introduce it to whatever he was having for lunch. If you wanted to be rid of his family as well, you might inject their Thanksgiving turkey before the holiday dinner. Widen the bull’s-eye to include a larger group of people, and you’d distribute the trigger across a sweeping number of routes. Instead of the food on the table you could saturate an entire population’s food supply — and beyond. Spread it over their farm soil, dump it into their reservoirs, float it through the air they breathed. Turn their environment into an extension of your weapon.
Enrique supposed the release of a powdered or aerosol medium would give the best shot at effecting a mass exposure. In fact, he had heard El Tío had done exactly that with the Sleeper virus itself. Just as whispers had reached him that Alberto Colon, who had died from mysterious causes last month, was El Tío’s first pigeon to die from a precision bio-strike.
Enrique had little doubt that the rumors concerning the virus’s dissemination were true. Whether those about Colón were accurate, he didn’t know. But it seemed a novel coincidence that the Bolivian president-elect had been poised to threaten the South American coca growers and suppliers from whom El Tío’s distribution network — of which the Quiros family was a part — obtained the majority of its product.
Right now, however, Enrique had something else to occupy his thoughts. A very personal affair had to be settled. And though he was inclined to stick with his initial feelings about how to do it, he wanted to deliberate on them further, confirm that he wasn’t allowing himself to make a dangerous blunder.
The difficulty now was that he was used to making calculated, rational decisions when it came to business. But in his business, things weren’t always that clear. Actions might be rational and emotional without contradiction. Violence could send simultaneous, definitive messages to both the heart and brain. And there were traditions that must not be violated. Matters of honor and loyalty.
He pictured Felix in the trunk of that car. His head blown to pieces and gnawed by rats. His flesh cooking in a soup of his own blood.
An effective message right there.
Enrique lifted his head from his hands, straightened, slipped his glasses back on, and sat quietly staring at the wall. The poor, brainless kid had overstepped. His stunt had hit the Salazars where it hurt. What choice did Lucio have except to retaliate? Enrique and his people had been aggressively cutting into his market, and because Lucio knew they were backed by El Tío’s international organization, he’d had to accept it, become resigned to shrinking profits. Success brought competition; it was a basic law of trade. However, he would not let himself be muscled aside, could not allow everything he’d built up to be usurped. He had to protect his interests. And if Lucio believed Enrique had condoned Felix’s move, as Lathrop said he did, he would be especially pressed to show it was a big miscalculation. Show where he drew his limits. Show a steep price had to be paid by the transgressor of those limits.
Enrique understood this. He appreciated that Felix had brought about his own fate with his deeds. And in a way, he’d also dictated the steps Enrique now must take, irrevocably linked him to a chain of action and consequence whose end could not be foreseen. Even in his sorrow over what had happened to Felix, Enrique resented him for that. And he suspected he always would. Were it not for him, this whole thing would never have gotten started.
But Felix had been his nephew. He could not let Lucio Salazar get away with his murder. Because it would make the Quiros family look vulnerable and invite further trouble, despite their powerful affiliations. And family was supposed to look after each other.
Enrique glanced down at the leather case on his desk, remembering the night he’d met Palardy at the harbor. To be involved in the assassination of somebody with Roger Gordian’s fame and stature, even if his connection couldn’t be verifiably established… it was insane. There again, his hand had been forced. He’d had to play along with El Tío, knowing very well that his almighty friend might otherwise become his most formidable enemy.