She stared up at the night sky. I followed her gaze upward. It seemed more vast and endless to me than ever.
“And if it is real . . . Jesus. It changes everything. If this life isn’t the end, if there’s a chance that we come back . . . That’s a whole other conversation and one I’m not sure we need to have right now.”
I nodded, more to myself than to her. All of that could wait. “I need to make sure Alex is safe,” I told her. “For good. If that’s what Navarro believes, then Alex isn’t going to be safe until that bastard is put away. That’s what I need to take care of first. After that . . . we’ll deal with the rest.”
I had to find Navarro. But once I did, I needed to shut him up, permanently. I didn’t want any of this to ever come to light—it would haunt, if you’ll forgive the pun, Alex for years to come and would make his life very difficult. I also didn’t want Navarro blabbing about this from some prison cell and inspiring a whole new wave of narcos to come chasing after my son like he was their golden goose.
I had to find El Brujo.
Little did I know that he’d find me first.
61
I didn’t hear them come in.
It was late. Really late, or really early, depending on which way you look at it. I wasn’t sleeping, but I guess my senses were so numb I couldn’t say I was awake either. I was physically and mentally trashed, and sleep would have been very welcome. I did get some, initially. Maybe a couple of hours. Then somewhere around four thirty in the morning, my eyes flickered awake, and that was it.
Jules and Cal, the new guy, were alternating two-hour shifts on watch, but I’d offered to share the roster with them. My shift, though, wasn’t till six. And yet, here I was, staring at the ceiling. Maybe I couldn’t rest until I’d found a hole, some way of sinking Tess’s theory. Or maybe it was something inside me—acutely sensitive hearing or some kind of ESP, depending on whether we’re going for a strictly scientific explanation or, given where my head was at, a more esoteric one—that shook me awake because of the imminent danger. Either way, I was awake, just barely, lying there in bed with Tess next to me, trapped in that really irritating zone where you’re too tired to think but too wound up to sleep.
I thought I heard a faint creak, like from a plank of flooring or a door frame. Could be Jules getting herself a cup of coffee from the kitchen—or was it Cal’s shift? I wasn’t sure. Jules, I think. The house was silent again for a moment. Then I heard another creak, followed by a metallic snap.
That one slapped me awake, but by then it was too late. I was halfway out of bed and reaching for my gun when the door to our bedroom flew open and two dark silhouettes swarmed in. My fingers never made it to the Browning’s grip. I felt the hard, deep sting in my chest before I realized one of them had targeted me with his gun, but it didn’t sound like a normal gun and what hit me wasn’t a bullet. It came out with a whoosh, like you got from a compressed air cartridge, and what I had in my chest wasn’t a gaping bullet wound. It was a three-inch-long syringe dart with a black tip at its back end.
I kept going for the gun, but one of the intruders was already on me and kicked my arm away from the night table before throwing me against the wall. I glimpsed Tess barely sitting up in the bed before she yelped as she was hit with another dart. I pushed myself off the wall to hit back at the intruder, but in mid-stride, my muscles turned to jelly and I just crumpled down to the floor like a rag doll.
I couldn’t lift a finger.
I could only watch, a prisoner of my own body, as they walked around me like I wasn’t even there. From the corner of my eye, I could see them lifting Tess off the bed and carrying her out of the room, and a rage like I’d never felt flared through me. My thoughts rocketed to Alex, and I hoped they’d used something else to drug him, something that didn’t keep him conscious like I was, something that would spare him the horror of witnessing this. I thought of Jules and Cal, too, hoping they weren’t deemed expendable, hoping they’d been spared. Then a face loomed into my frame of vision, upside down, from behind me. A new face, one I’d never seen before, but I knew it was him.
Right there, inches away from me. And I couldn’t lay a finger on him or rip his damn heart out. Assuming he had one.
I just stared up at him, lost in my silent fury, screaming my lungs out in total silence, and I thought of spiders and lizards and what my tox report would look like when they did my postmortem.
THURSDAY
62
“Hey, come on, wake up. Please.”
The words woke me up with a start.
It took a few seconds for my eyes to focus, but I already knew I wasn’t going to like what they showed me. My head felt woolly, not quite like a hangover. More like my skull had been caught in a vise that was just loosened by half a turn.
I was lying on a thin cot and the first thing I noticed was that my hands weren’t bound. The cot squeaked as I bent up, and I saw that my legs weren’t tied either. I glanced around. My surroundings were spartan to a fault. I was in a windowless room, about fifteen-foot square. Its walls were old and made of stone that rose up into a low barrel vault. There was literally nothing else in the room apart from me and the cot and a guy who was just standing there, staring across at me like I was a stranded alien. Which, in a sense, I realized I probably was.
“Who are you?” he asked, his voice wobbly and bristling with racked nerves.
I looked at him, and clarity started to seep back into my brain. “You’re Stephenson.”
Surprise flushed through his face. “How’d you know? Who are you?”
I sat up, slid my feet to the floor, and rubbed some life into my thighs and arms as I looked around our cell.
“I’m Sean Reilly. FBI.” My mouth felt like it was lined with sandpaper.
“What the hell’s happening?” he asked. “Where are we?”
The air was cool, but there was a latent humidity in the room, like it was seeping in through the walls.
“I’d say we’re somewhere in Mexico.”
His jaw dropped, and he had trouble mouthing his next question. “Mexico? What? Why? Do you know what the hell’s going on? I’m a college professor, for God’s sake. They must have the wrong guy.”
He told me they came for him one morning, early. He couldn’t remember exactly how long ago this was. The days since had blended into each other. They’d made him call his secretary, then they’d gagged and blindfolded him and stuffed him into the trunk of a car. From there, he’d been driven somewhere, led down some stairs, and tied to a wall. He’d been held there by some bikers who hadn’t bothered to keep his blindfold on, then he’d been taken by others—Spanish-speaking Latino types who, now that I’d mentioned it, were most likely Mexican. He’d seen the dead bikers littering the place where he’d been held.
Then it was my turn to explain. “I’m Alex Martinez’s father,” I told him. “And no, they don’t have the wrong guy. You’re here—we’re all here—because of Alex.”
His jaw dropped even further.
It didn’t look like we were going anywhere for a while. So I told him what I knew.