His mug was empty. “Dad-gum-it,” he muttered. Spinning in his chair, he snagged the handle of the coffeepot and poured himself a refill, then took a swig. Grimacing, he spat it back into the mug. The coffee had been cooking for upwards of three hours, thickening to a bitter sludge, now more suitable for fossilizing fence posts — rendering them rot resistant and bugproof — than for reinvigorating humans. Wilson took another glance at the screen, assured himself that the two aircraft posed no possible risk to each other, and hurried to the sink. It took him just thirty seconds to dump the sludge, rinse and refill the pot, pour the water into the machine, and jam a fresh filter pack into the brew basket.
When he returned to his seat, the F-18 was already on the ground at Miramar; the civilian aircraft had leveled off at twenty-seven hundred feet; oddly, though, it had changed course by ninety degrees, a right bank so steep the turn was almost square cornered. “What the hell?” said Wilson. The plane was heading southeast now, streaking toward the border like a scalded cat; in less than a minute—hell, not even, he realized — it would enter Mexican airspace, due south of Otay Mountain. Then, as Wilson stared, mesmerized and paralyzed, the icon on the radar screen began to blink, and three words appeared beside it, flashing in sync with a harsh electronic rasp: LOW ALTITUDE ALERT.
A shape as tan as the rocks, as fluid as quicksilver, flowed down the stony slope, the very embodiment of stealth and predatory focus. Below, something moved, and the creature — an adult male mountain lion, 150 pounds of cunning, sinew, and hunger — froze, its belly pressed to the rock. After a long pause, punctuated only by the sound of labored, painful breathing twenty feet away, the big cat flowed forward again, its tail twitching as it closed on its prey.
Its prey was Jesús Antonio Gonzales, a new, illegal, injured, and unsuspecting immigrant. Fleeing what he’d feared to be a Border Patrol truck jolting along the ridge in the darkness, Jesús had darted off the road and scrambled down the slope. Suddenly he’d taken a step into nothingness — one moment the mountain was solidly beneath his feet, the next moment it was gone. Tumbling off a ledge, he’d landed on his left side, hard, atop a boulder. He’d tried to regain his feet but quickly sank back against the rock, the pain in his ribs causing him to gasp and groan. He now lay twenty feet below the rim of the outcrop, and even if he hadn’t been injured, he felt sure he wouldn’t be able to climb back up the way he’d come down. He dared not risk another fall in the steep terrain — he’d barely missed cracking his head on the boulder, and if he fell again, he might not be as lucky — so he resolved to stay where he was, to wait until dawn before limping out of the mountains and into the outskirts of San Diego. There would be other, different risks in daylight — for one, he’d heard that La Migra, the immigration police, had cameras and motion detectors and dogs everywhere — but Jesús would just have to take his chances. He closed his eyes and shifted against the rock. The movement caused the ends of his splintered ribs to grate against one another, like shards of glass grinding inside him, and he grunted in pain.
Jesús could have paid a coyote, an immigrant smuggler, to bring him across — he probably should have, he realized now — but the coyote had demanded an outrageous sum: five thousand U.S. dollars, which Jesús didn’t possess, and for what? A bone-jarring ride across the desert inside the hot cylinder of an empty water truck, followed by a two-day hike to the nearest city. Cheaper and safer to find his own way, he had decided; after all, coyotes weren’t infallible, either; some, he’d heard, had been known to leave people dying in the desert — abandoned hundreds of miles from the nearest town, or even locked inside a cargo container. Besides, he consoled himself, maybe everything would still work out just fine, despite his fall and his broken ribs: maybe, by daylight, the stabbing pain in his side would ease, and Jesús would find a good path down, and San Diego would spread itself before him like a glittering kingdom — a kingdom so rich that even his namesake, Jesús Cristo, would have yielded to temptation and bowed for the sake of such glory and wealth. Sí, Jesús Antonio Gonzales told himself, San Diego será mío. He practiced it in English: Yes. San Diego will be mine.
Somewhere in the darkness, he heard the throaty hum of an aircraft engine — or was it two? — and he prayed it was not Border Patrol helicopters scouring the hills. As he listened, trying to place the source of the sound, a pebble clattered down the rocky face above him. Bouncing off a nearby boulder, the stone tapped Jesús Antonio on the arm, as if to get his attention. Puzzled, he looked up, and in the darkness above him, he saw the gleam of jewels: a pair of green-gold eyes. They glittered, brighter and brighter in the light — the light that had inexplicably appeared in midair and was now rushing toward him, its glare accompanied by a deafening roar. A cone of incandescence encircled Jesús Antonio — Jesús and the mountain lion, too, spotlighting them as neatly as if man and beast were actors on a rocky stage. And as the single-minded beast made its instinctual leap, closing the gap between its fangs and Jesús Antonio’s neck, the cone of light narrowed, narrowed, narrowed, so that at the precise instant Jesús Antonio reached up to cross himself, his trembling finger touched the very tip of the hurtling jet.
It was the briefest of touches — less than a millisecond — yet in that fleeting touch, Jesús’s fingertip wrought a miracle: Night became day; darkness was transformed into light, a burst of red and orange and yellow, with pyrotechnic sparks and spokes of purple and green and magenta shooting off in all directions; Jesús himself was transubstantiated — the injured immigrant, the indigenous mountain lion, the hurtling airplane, and the high-octane fuel, all of them — transformed from mundane matter into dazzling energy, a radiant bloom upon the blackness that engulfed the wider world beyond.
Chapter 4
I was humming, halfway through my morning shower, when Kathleen flung open the bathroom door. “Bill, come quick!” she shouted, then turned and ran, adding, “Hurry. Hurry!” She sounded not just urgent but upset.
I flipped off the water and grabbed my towel, calling after her, “What’s wrong? Kathleen? Kathleen! Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m fine,” she yelled from the other end of the house. “There’s something on the news you need to see.”
I mopped the suds from my head and chest and wrapped the towel around my waist. Still dripping, I hurried to the kitchen, where I knew Kathleen would be watching The Today Show, as she did every weekday morning over coffee and granola. On the countertop TV screen, a tanned, silver-haired guy — a tennis pro or investment banker, judging by the well-kept, self-satisfied look of him — was slow dancing with a gorgeous younger woman. “Viagra,” intoned a deep voice, smooth and confident. “Make it happen.”
“So… honey,” I began, turning toward her, “is there something you’re trying to tell me?” I turned toward her, expecting to see amusement in her eyes — she was a good prankster, when she wanted to be — but her coffee cup was trembling in her hand, and her expression looked distraught.
“What? No, not that. This.” She tapped the television, where The Today Show’s news anchor, an attractive woman whose name I could never remember, had just appeared on-screen for her 7 A.M. rundown of the headlines. Superimposed across the lower part of the screen were the words “BREAKING NEWS — FIERY CALIFORNIA JET CRASH.”