“Are you sure?”
“Impossible to be one hundred percent sure, my man. The transmissions are encrypted, and all I was able to figure out was that they’re in German. Cracked a few proper nouns here and there. According to the government’s triangulation of the cell signal, it’s been moving fast across central and northwestern Florida.”
“How fast?”
“Plane-fast.”
“When?”
“Seventy minutes ago.”
“That must be the plane that just landed in Alabama. What else?”
“Nothing except for a brief unencrypted burst in Spanish. That burst mentioned a place: Cananea.”
“ Cananea,” Pendergast whispered. “Where is that?”
“A town in Sonora, Mexico… in the middle of nowhere, thirty miles south of the border.”
“Sketch me a picture of the town.”
“My research indicates it has a population of thirty thou. It was once a huge mining center—copper—and it was the site of a bloody strike that helped launch the Mexican Revolution. Now it hosts a couple of maquiladora factories on the north side and that’s about it.”
“Geographic situation?”
“There’s a river that starts in Cananea and flows north over the border into Arizona. Called the San Pedro. One of the few north-flowing rivers on the continent. It’s a major route for smuggling drugs and illegals. Except that the surrounding desert is brutal. That’s where a lot of those would-be immigrants die. The border along there is apparently remote as hell, just a barbed-wire fence—but it’s got sensors and patrols up the wazoo. Plus a tethered blimp that can see a cigarette on the ground in the dark.”
Pendergast cradled the phone. It made sense. Deprived of their plane, and anticipating the APB border alerts, Helen’s captors would have had to find a clandestine way to cross the border into Mexico. The Rio San Pedro corridor south to Cananea was as good as any.
That would be his last chance to intercept them.
He left the telephone booth—staggered, his head still spinning—and found himself forced to sit down abruptly in the dirt. He was weak, he was exhausted, he was losing blood, and he had not slept or taken nourishment in more than two days. But this sudden weakness went beyond the physical. His mind, his entire being, was wounded.
He forced himself to examine his shattered psychological state. What he now felt for Helen—whether or not he still loved her—he did not know. He had believed her dead for twelve years. He had reconciled himself to that. And now she was alive. All he knew for certain was that if he had not insisted on seeing her again, if he had not bungled their assignation so badly, Helen would still be safe. He had to reverse that failure. He had to rescue her from Der Bund—not only for her preservation, but for his own. Otherwise…
He did not let himself think about the otherwise. Instead—summoning every last reserve of strength—he rose to his feet. He had to get to Cananea, one way or another.
He limped toward the parking lot of the airfield, bathed in sodium lights. A single car was parked there: an old tan Eldorado. No doubt owned by the airport administrator.
It appeared the man would be doing him another favor.
+ Eighty-Two Hours
PENDERGAST PULLED THE SMOKING, BATTERED ELDORADO into a gas station outside the tiny town of Palominas, Arizona. He had covered the twenty-two hundred miles without rest, stopping only for gas.
He got out, steadying himself by leaning on the door. It was two AM, and the immense desert sky was sprinkled with stars. There was no moon.
After a moment, he went into the convenience store attached to the gas station. Here he purchased a map of the Mexican state of Sonora, half a dozen water bottles, some packages of beef jerky, cookies, some potted meat product, a couple of dish towels, bandages, antibiotic ointment, a bottle of ibuprofen, caffeine tablets, duct tape, and a flashlight. All these went into a doubled-up plastic grocery bag, which he took back to the car. Sitting in the driver’s seat once again, he studied the map he had bought, committing its features to memory.
He left the gas station and drove eastward on Route 92, crossing the San Pedro River on a small bridge. Past the bridge, he turned right on a dirt ranch road heading south. Driving slowly, the car bumping and scraping along the rutted track, he moved through scrubby mesquite and catclaw thickets, headlights stabbing into the crooked branches. The unseen river lay to his right, outlined in black by a dense line of cottonwood trees.
About half a mile from the border, Pendergast drove the car off the road into a thicket of mesquite, forcing it in as far as it would go. He turned off the engine, exited the car with the grocery bag in hand, then listened in the darkness. A pair of coyotes howled in the distance, but otherwise there was no sign of life.
He knew this was an illusion. This stretch of the Mexican-U.S. border, separated by only a five-strand barbed-wire fence, bristled with sophisticated sensors, infrared video cameras, and downward-looking radar, with rapid-response Border Patrol teams mere minutes away.
But Pendergast was unconcerned. He had an advantage few other smugglers or border crooks had: he was going south. Into Mexico.
Tying up the grocery bag in his suit jacket, he fashioned it into a crude haversack, slung it over his shoulder, and began to walk.
The movement of his injured leg caused it to start bleeding again. He paused, sat down, and spent a few moments unbandaging the wound by flashlight, smearing fresh antibiotic ointment into it, then binding it up again with clear bandages and the dish towels. He followed this by swallowing four ibuprofen and as many caffeine tablets.
It took him several minutes to get back on his feet. This would not do: he had a long way to go. He chewed some beef jerky and took a drink of water.
By keeping off the dirt track, away from the river, he hoped to avoid the various electronic traps and sensors. The huge tethered blimp that hovered unseen in the night sky overhead may have noted his presence, but as he was moving south, he hoped it would not trigger a response—at least, not yet.
The night air, even in summer, was cool. The coyotes had ceased howling; all was silent. Pendergast moved on.
The road made a ninety-degree turn to parallel a barbed-wire fence—the actual border. He crossed the road—certain he had now set off various sensors—arrived at the fence, and within seconds had cut the strands and forced his way to the Mexican side. He limped off into the darkness, crossing a vacant expanse of pebbled desert, dotted with catclaw.
Not much time passed before he saw headlights on the American side. He kept going, angling toward the cottonwoods along the river, moving as fast as he could. Several spotlights flicked on and the pools of light speared the desert night, scouring the landscape until they fixed on him, bathing him in brilliant white.
He kept going. A megaphoned voice echoed over the field, speaking first English and then Spanish, ordering him to halt, to turn around, to raise his hands and identify himself.
Pendergast continued on, ignoring this. There was nothing they could do. They could not pursue, and it would be fruitless to call their counterparts on the Mexican side. Nobody cared about clandestine traffic headed south.
He angled toward the line of cottonwoods along the river. The spotlights followed him for a while, with more desultory megaphoned commands, until he entered the trees. At that point they gave up.
Hidden within the protective canopy, he sat down to rest on the banks of the shallow creek of the San Pedro. He tried to eat, the food like cardboard in his mouth; he forced himself to chew and swallow. He drank some more water and resisted the impulse to unwrap his freshly blood-soaked bandages.