At the end of that time he returned to his office, printed out his résumé, and then went home to shower, shave, and dress in a suit and tie. He made sure his shoes were highly polished. Then, the résumé folded and tucked in his breast pocket, he drove to the Monition Club and parked in a nearby municipal underground lot.
There was a certain spring in his gait as he went up the stone steps and into the imposing lobby. The same woman manned the high desk in the center, and he went up to her and asked for the director of public relations.
“We have no director of public relations,” she said with an unsmiling face. “How may I help you?”
“I wish to see the person in charge of hiring personnel,” Willard said.
The woman looked at him dubiously for a moment, then she said, “We aren’t hiring.”
Willard put some honey into his voice and smiled. “Nevertheless, I would very much appreciate you telling whoever’s in charge that I would like to see him-or her.”
“You’d need to have a résumé with you.”
Willard produced it.
Eyeing it, the receptionist smiled and said, “Your name?”
“Frederick Willard.”
“One moment, Mr. Willard.” She dialed an internal extension and murmured into the microphone of her wireless headset. When she had disconnected she looked up at him and said, “Please have a seat, Mr. Willard. Someone will be out shortly.”
Willard thanked her, then walked back to the same bench where he and Peter Marks had waited for Oliver Liss. The receptionist went back to answering the phone and directing calls. Willard thought this system oddly antiquated. It appeared as if the personnel who worked at the Monition Club did not have direct phone lines.
This interested him, and he began to study the woman more closely. Though she was young and at first blush looked like the standard-issue receptionist, he was getting the sense that she was something altogether different. For one thing, she seemed to make the decision of whether or not he was going to get past her. For another, it looked as if she was vetting each call.
After thirty minutes or so a slim young man appeared through a door set flush with one of the wall panels. He was dressed in a charcoal-gray conservatively cut suit. His tie had what appeared to be a gold bar embroidered in its center. He went directly over to the receptionist and, bending forward slightly, spoke to her in a voice so low that even within the confines of the hushed lobby Willard could not hear what he said or what the receptionist replied.
Then he turned and, with a noncommittal smile on his face, approached Willard.
“Mr. Willard, please follow me.”
Without waiting for a reply, he turned on his heel. Willard went across the lobby. As he passed the receptionist’s desk, he saw her watching him.
The young man took him through the door and down a dimly lit, wood-paneled corridor. It was carpeted and decorated with paintings of medieval hunting scenes. They passed doors on either side. All of them were closed, and Willard could hear nothing at all inside. Either the offices were empty, which he doubted, or the doors were soundproofed-yet another anomaly for a workplace. At least, one that wasn’t part of the clandestine services.
At length, the young man stopped in front of a door on the left, knocked once, then opened the door inward.
“Mr. Frederick Willard,” the young man announced in a curiously formal manner as he stepped across the threshold.
Following him, Willard found himself not in an office but in a library, and a surprisingly large one, at that. Bookshelves lined three of the walls from floor to ceiling. The fourth wall was an immense picture window that looked out on a small but beautifully landscaped cloister garden with a central fountain in the Moorish style. It looked like something out of the sixteenth century.
In front of this window was a large refectory table of a thick, dark hardwood, polished to a high gloss. Seven high-backed wooden chairs were arranged at regular intervals around the table. In one sat a man with rounded shoulders, thick hair pushed back from his wide forehead in silver wings, and skin the color of honey. A large, very thick book was open in front of him, which he was studying with great concentration. Then he looked up, and Willard was confronted by a pair of piercing blue eyes, a large, hawk-like nose, and a hard smile.
“Come in, Mr. Willard,” he said, that hard smile fixed in place. “We’ve been expecting you.”
They use pleasure craft-very expensive yachts,” Contreras said.
“To go up and down the coast,” Soraya said.
“That’s the safest way to transport goods up from central Mexico, where they’re received from the Colombian cartels.”
The desert sky was huge, so chock-full of stars that in certain places the night seemed hazed an icy blue. The barest crescent of a moon hung low in the sky, giving off precious little illumination. Contreras checked the dial of his watch; it seemed he had the schedule of the patrolling migrasdown to a science.
They were crouched in the deep shadow thrown by a clump of sagebrush and a giant saguaro cactus. When they spoke it was in the barest of whispers. She followed the pollero’s lead so that, like his, her voice sounded no different than the dry desert wind.
“Your man is into drugs, count on it,” Contreras said. “Why else does a man like him want to sneak into Mexico?”
It was colder here than she had expected, and she shivered a little.
“Unless someone was meeting him, he would have gone straight to Nogales, stolen a car, and then headed due west to the coast.”
Soraya was about to reply when he put a forefinger to his lips. She listened, and a moment later she heard what had alerted him: the soft crunch of boot soles across the ground not far from them. When a spotlight was switched on Contreras didn’t even twitch, which meant he had been expecting it. The light swung in an arc, not at the area where they were hidden, but ahead of them, where the invisible border stretched, desolate and windblown. She heard a grunt, then the light was switched off and the sound of the boot soles faded away.
She was about to shift position when Contreras grabbed her and held her still. Even in the starry darkness she could feel his eyes glaring at her. She held her breath. A moment later the beam of blinding light re-ignited, sweeping a larger portion of the desert ahead. Then three shots exploded into the night, sending up tiny dust devils where the bullets impacted the earth.
She heard a brief gurgle, which might have been a laugh. The light was extinguished. Then all was stillness again, and the lonesome soughing of the wind reasserted itself.
Now we go,Contreras mouthed to her.
She nodded, following him on cramped legs as they skirted the clump of sagebrush and, circling to the right, dashed across the flat ground from the United States into Mexico. There was nothing at all to mark their transition from one country to another.
In the distance she heard the howl of a coyote, but couldn’t tell from what side of the border it came. A jackrabbit, springing out of their way, startled her. She found that her heart was racing, and there was an odd sort of singing in her ears, as if her blood were rushing too quickly through her veins and arteries.
Contreras led her forward at a steady pace, never stopping, never at a loss for direction. His confidence was absolute, and she felt secure within the circumference of it. It was an odd and slightly unsettling feeling, one that made her think of Amun, of Cairo, and of their time in the Egyptian desert. Could it have been just weeks ago? It seemed like such a long time since she’d seen him, and their text messages were becoming fewer and shorter as time went on.
The night was now starless, as profoundly dark as the bottom of the ocean, as if even hours from now there would be no dawn, no sun rising in the distant eastern sky. A sudden crack of thunder came to her, but it sounded far away, streaking through the sky of another country.