“My boss wants to brief you,” Randal answered.
“Who’s your boss?”
“Lyle Nesmith. A brilliant analyst and tactician.”
“We didn’t come here to meet people.”
A maid wearing a white apron ushered them through a cool stucco house to a patio with flowering plants and a fountain. A buffet of enchiladas, fajitas, and tamales had been laid out on a long tiled table. A waiter asked what they wanted to drink.
Crocker was losing patience. “Where’s Nesmith?”
“He’s upstairs on a call,” Randal answered with a confident grin. “He’s coming.”
Twenty minutes later the agent-in-charge greeted them, a short, fit, bald man with a graying goatee and round rimless glasses. “You missed them,” Nesmith said as he and Crocker sat down across from one another at one of the round metal tables.
“Missed who?” Crocker asked, almost spitting out the food in his mouth.
“The Iranians. I just learned that the Toyota Corolla they were driving tried to cross the border at the Ysleta International Bridge.”
“What?” Crocker rose to his feet.
“Don’t worry, they were turned away by U.S. immigration agents who noticed that none of their names matched the name on the car’s registration.”
“Why weren’t they detained?” Crocker asked.
Nesmith calmly adjusted his glasses. “There was some sort of miscommunication between D.C. and here,” he said. “The ICE agents had the Iranian names on their detention list, not the Venezuelan names on their new passports.”
Crocker wanted to punch something. “What?”
“Calm down. I’ve got people out looking for them now. We’ll find them.”
“How long ago did this happen?” Crocker asked. “I mean, exactly when did they try to cross the border?”
Nesmith looked at his silver Rolex. “Roughly an hour ago.”
“Fuck!” Crocker crossed to the far corner of the yard. Looking up at the broken glass on top of the high wall, he wondered what to do now and whom to call.
He was joined by Mancini and Tré. The latter said, “A samurai master once said: True patience means bearing the unbearable. If that helps.”
Mancini added, “And abused patience turns into fury.”
Crocker spent the time playing fetch with Nesmith’s two black German shepherds-strong, sure-footed, beautiful dogs. An hour passed, during which the table on the patio was cleared and the blue sky clouded over.
Crocker saw Nesmith emerge from the house and walk toward him with Randal by his side. “See what they want,” he said, turning to Mancini.
Mancini crossed the yard, spoke to Nesmith, and returned. With his arms crossed against his chest, he said, “They found the silver Corolla.”
“Where?”
“Parked outside a motel in the southeast part of town.”
Crocker: “Are the three Iranians registered there?”
“Nesmith says they are.”
“Let’s go.”
He wanted no part of Nesmith, Randal, or the four armed guards, except that he and his men needed weapons, hats, fake beards and mustaches. He also needed Randal to serve as their driver, since they didn’t know their way around.
Nesmith argued that a raid like the one they were about to launch required clearances from the local police and backup, but Crocker insisted on keeping the circle small.
They set out midafternoon in a taxi they had rented for the day with Randal at the wheel, talking a mile a minute, informing them that they were entering an extremely dangerous part of town that was run by a branch of the powerful Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas.
“I don’t give a fuck about any drug cartel,” Crocker retorted. “Press on.”
“You don’t understand how pervasive their influence is,” Randal explained. “I’m talking everyone from beggars on the street to the Presidential Palace and everything in between. You see that old lady out there selling tortillas? She’s probably one of their informers. As soon as we pass, she’ll report on us. We’re going to get stopped and questioned. You’ll see.”
“Shut up and drive.”
Los Anillos Motel was an L-shaped dive at the end of a block lined with small assembly plants and warehouses. It looked like the kind of place where people came to hide or slit their wrists. There were a half dozen vehicles parked in the lot out front. One was a silver Corolla.
“That’s it,” Mancini said.
Crocker, with his mustache dyed black and the brim of a straw hat pulled low over his forehead, got out with a 9mm Glock tucked under his black T-shirt. He looked around, stretched, then walked to the end of the motel, strolled past a little Pemex gas station, and circled around back.
On his return he leaned in the driver’s window and spoke to Randal in a low voice. “Go to the desk and find out what room they’re in. Call me on the radio. I want you to stay in the office and make sure the person there doesn’t warn whoever might be in the room. As soon as you see us crash through the front door, hurry back to the car and start the engine.”
“Okay. I got it. I understand. What are you guys gonna do?”
“Go. Now!”
“First I’ve got to call Nesmith.”
“You do and I’ll beat your head in,” Crocker said matter-of-factly.
Randal nodded, got out, and walked stiffly to the motel office. A few minutes later his voice came over the walkie-talkie held by Mancini in the backseat. “Room eleven.”
“Let’s deploy,” Crocker said.
Mancini, wearing a New York Mets cap pulled down so low that only his dark eyes and thickly bearded face showed, waited for Crocker to again circle to the back. He counted three minutes on his watch, then rapped hard on the red door. No one answered. Ten seconds later he heard Crocker crash through the rear window.
Mancini kicked in the door and hurried in with Tré behind him. The only person they found was Crocker, holding his Glock and vigorously shaking his head. He mouthed the words “No one’s here.”
The three men moved fast, checking the closets, bathroom, under the unmade double beds. They found no suitcases, only dirty towels, and a discarded newspaper and two empty water bottles in the trash. Crocker thought he saw an impression on the cover of a Spanish-language magazine on a night table near the phone. He stuck it in his back pocket and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
They were back on the carretera in minutes. Randal thought they were being followed by a white van. Crocker watched it through the dust-covered side mirror and saw a woman at the wheel and a baby in a child seat behind her.
“We’re clear,” he said. “Keep driving.”
Randal steered them to a six-story apartment building on a street behind the U.S. Consulate, pulled into the underground garage, and closed the iron gate.
“That was close,” he said, getting out.
Crocker: “No it wasn’t.”
Upstairs, in the third-floor apartment that was their temporary base, Crocker used the old pencil-and-white-paper trick to lift an impression off the magazine cover. It was a name, “Cucho Valdez,” and a number, “7862.”
Randal didn’t know what the number meant, but said the name belonged to a smuggler associated with the drug cartels who ran a silver and curio stall in the Mercado Juárez, on Avenida 16 de Septiembre in the center of town.
“Let’s go talk to him.”
They piled back into the taxi and slowly nosed through rush hour traffic to the city center.
“What’s the significance of the sixteenth of September?” Crocker asked.
“It’s the day Mexico celebrates its independence from Spain,” Randal answered.
Mancini, who seemed knowledgeable about practically anything having to do with history, geography, weapons, foreign cultures, and technology, added, “It’s actually the day Father Miguel Hidalgo rallied people to march on Mexico City. Kind of like our Fourth of July, which was the day the Declaration of Independence was signed, even though United States sovereignty wasn’t formally recognized until the Treaty of Paris, ratified after the Revolutionary War.”