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  The young agents looked at each other, smiling.

  “You’re about to,” Agent McCarthy said, opening the door.

  “But where’s the … you know, buildings and TSA gropers and everything?” I asked, stepping out and spotting for the first time the macadam runway in front of us.

  “That’s at an airport,” the female fed explained as she checked her watch. “This is an airfield.”

  “Aha,” I said, pretending like that explained something.

  When I turned to her partner for clarification, he was pointing up at the sky.

  “Here comes your ride now,” Leo said.

  Far in the distance to the east, a plane began to make a whistling descent out of the wild blue yonder. Though unmarked and military charcoal gray, it looked sort of like a corporate jet.

  The plane made a wide turn to land from the west. I was almost surprised that the plane didn’t start buzzing me like the crop duster that goes after Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

  The sleek, rumbling jet aircraft landed and taxied up, close enough for me to reach out and touch the razorlike edge of its wing. Its jets were rumbling so loud that I couldn’t even hear myself when I thanked the agents who handed me my bags.

  Instead of a stewardess, a green-fatigues-clad soldier wearing a beret dropped the door and helped me aboard. As the soldier resealed the door, I could see that the plane’s resemblance to a G6 ended at the steps. Inside, it looked like a cargo plane, with netting and jump seats, and smelled frighteningly like spilled gasoline. A female pilot gave me a wide smile and a thumbs-up from the forward cockpit.

  “Can I get you anything, sir?” the soldier asked after he expertly strapped me and my bags to the wall.

  Still in a state of shock and awe, I just shook my head as the jets fired and the desert outside the window started to roll.

  The soldier didn’t offer me any peanuts or headphones, but he did snap out a large brown paper bag and handed it to me as we left the ground.

  “Just in case,” he said.

  CHAPTER 31

  AS WE HEADED SOUTH, the friendly soldier-steward told me his name was Larry and that the plane was called a C-26 Metroliner.

  What he failed to mention was why I was on a military aircraft, but I had a feeling I was about to find out.

  It had been just under an hour when we touched back down to earth. Not bad, considering that Cody’s ranch was almost six hundred miles from LA. Even in a military cargo plane, I decided flying private was the way to go. No one had even once made the suggestion that they wanted to touch my junk.

  When I looked out the porthole of a window, not too far off I spotted a couple of parked Chinook cargo helicopters. Where are the Delta and Southwest planes? I wondered. Where are the guys driving the luggage carts? Instead of these usual airport sights, beyond the runway fence were rows of two-story dormitory-style buildings. It looked like we were on some sort of military base.

  “I take it this isn’t LAX,” I said to Larry.

  “No, sir. We’re at SCLA, Southern Cal Logistics Airport,” he said.

  Emily Parker was sitting waiting for me in a Gator XUV, a golf cart on steroids, as Larry dropped the door. She was checking her phone and trying to look all nonchalant, like private jets were the most ho-hum thing in the world to her.

  But after I thanked Larry and the pilot and started to walk over, she cracked a smile and started giggling. When she wanted to, Agent Parker could look as steely as the snub-nosed Colt .45 automatic she packed, but when she smiled like that, she looked like the girl you were too afraid to ask to your high school prom. I’d forgotten what a great smile it was. Almost.

  “Hey, what do you think? Pretty cool, huh?” she said, elbowing me as I sat. “I told you they wanted you. How does it feel to get the Nancy Pelosi treatment? You’re a real government VIP now.”

  “I didn’t fill the barf sack on the ride here, so I guess that’s a start,” I said, dropping my bags in the back of the Gator.

  We started to drive. The army MP on duty nodded at us as we came through the airfield gate. Which wasn’t easy, since the young man was trying to look down Emily’s shirt at the same time. On the other side of the fence was a road with the dormlike buildings I’d seen from the plane.

  “OK, Parker. Give it up,” I said as we hummed along. “What is all this? I didn’t know I was joining the army. Are we going to the hangar where they have the aliens now? I mean, what’s up with the Area Fifty-One routine? What the heck is going on? What is this place? An air force base?”

  “Kind of. It used to be George Air Force Base, but it was mothballed in ’ninety-two. They turned half of it into Southern Cal Logistics, a municipal airport, and kept the other half of it—the dormitories and surrounding area—for multiple military use, mostly training.”

  “OK, but why are we here?”

  “Let’s get you settled first,” Emily said, swinging into a parking lot.

  She took me through a door and up a flight of stairs, and dropped my overnight on a cot in a little room halfway down the hall. She locked the door and handed me a key.

  “Are you the RA?” I said, taking it. “Where do I get my meal card? Or do I have to report for boot camp? Help me out.”

  “Head’s a couple of doors down, on your left,” she said, all business now. “There’s a general meeting in about an hour. Why don’t we get a bite to eat, and I’ll bring you up to speed.”

  CHAPTER 32

  BACK DOWNSTAIRS, WE GRABBED a couple of Cokes and plastic-wrapped turkey clubs off a tray in the dormitory’s kitchen. We were taking them outside to a picnic table beside the parking lot when a short, wiry, black-haired man dressed in camo came through the front doors. Though short in stature, he carried himself with a physical grace, like an old-time baseball shortstop.

  “Emily,” the soldier said, smiling as he stopped in front of us. “I thought I heard you come in. And you must be Michael Bennett.”

  “This is Colonel D’Ambrose, Mike,” Emily said. “He’s in charge of this …”

  “Shindig? Fiasco? I haven’t quite figured out what it is myself yet,” D’Ambrose said, shaking my hand. “Have you brought Mike up to speed?”

  “Just about to, over lunch.” She smiled.

  “Excellent,” D’Ambrose said. “Let me grab some grub and join you.”

  “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this until you sign the paperwork,” D’Ambrose said at the picnic table a few minutes later, as he speared some potato salad onto a plastic fork, “but large things are afoot, Mike. Forty-eight hours ago, the president signed a national security directive targeting Perrine as a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. Now, instead of just local and federal law enforcement, my military boys are on board.

  “As of seven this morning, the Department of Justice is now working hand in hand with my covert-ops guys, the Navy SEALs and Delta Force, and the airborne-signal intelligence-gathering unit known as Gray Fox, as well as the CIA and NSA.”

  I stared at him, taken aback. I’d seen investigations ramped up before, but I’d never worked with the actual military.

  “Did this little order suspend posse comitatus?” I asked, squinting at him. “You know, the federal statute that says the military can’t operate within the continental US?”

  “They finally eject California from the Union?” the feisty colonel said, smiling.

  “The colonel and his men aren’t actually operating on US soil,” Emily said, turning to me. “See, we believe Perrine is hiding somewhere in Mexico. Because of the rampant amount of bribery and corruption in the law enforcement agencies and even the military of our sister republic, the Mexican president has reluctantly agreed to let us into Mexico to act as special advisers in the hunt for Perrine.”

  “Which is not something the Mexican president is ready to crow about, since it’s an election year,” the colonel added. “Because discretion is mandatory, this base is the military’s rallying point for a
irborne sorties over the border.”

  “OK, I think I’m getting the picture,” I said. “Go on.”

  “That’s just one side of the blade,” D’Ambrose said. “Perrine’s people are now operating in LA, so we’re going to be working with the LA FBI and DEA, and the LAPD as well.”

  “Don’t forget the Mexican authorities,” Emily said. “The federales, and even CISEN.”

  “CISEN?” I asked.

  “The Mexican intelligence agency, equivalent to our CIA,” D’Ambrose said.

  “Exactly,” said Emily. “We’re going soup to nuts, from street cops to the feds to the intelligence community and the army.”

  “In two different countries?” I said, and shook my head.

  “Yep,” D’Ambrose said. “Starting to feel my pain now? You don’t speak Spanish, by any chance, do you?”

  I nodded and looked up as one of the Chinook helicopters went by close enough to land on the roof of the barracks. Half the napkins we had brought went flying as well.

  “This thing is a real mess,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” Emily asked. “I thought you’d be pleased. Action is finally being taken. Perrine is being looked at like the international terrorist that he is. You’re not happy that they’re finally going after Perrine in a serious way?”

  “It didn’t have to come to all this, Emily. How many years was nothing done about the border? About the cartels? We let this fester. Now things are so bad, we have to bring in the military? It’s a disgrace. Everybody is goddamn asleep at the switch these days.”

  “Not everybody, Mike,” Emily said. “Colonel D’Ambrose has been working tirelessly on this for the last three months. Before that, he and his men at the Joint Special Operations Command helped redefine counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq, bringing in the CIA and NSA to sort through the electronic pocket litter that the Special Forces teams found on the battlefield. There’s no one better on the planet to head up this kind of international manhunt.”

  The colonel smiled as he wiped his mouth.

  “Thanks for the defense, Emily, but Detective Bennett here is more correct than he knows. I’m disgusted, too, Detective. We needed to keep our house clean, but we didn’t. Letting things go to the point where the exterminator has to come to your house is pretty damn embarrassing.”

  CHAPTER 33

  AFTER WE FINISHED EATING, D’Ambrose left for a meeting, and Parker took me over to Building 14. The huge open room on the ground floor was being used by D’Ambrose’s JSOC guys as the multiple-agency task force command center.

  There were desks everywhere, several large PowerPoint boards and flat screens, a podium. Everyone on the task force must have been taking a break to eat, because except for a couple of soldiers running some wires through the drop ceiling, we were alone.

  We grabbed a couple of coffees from a well-stocked table, and I followed Emily over to a desk.

  “We found this footage two days ago at a safe house we raided with the federales in Durango,” Emily said, tapping at a laptop as we sat. “It’s of a dinner Perrine held for his top cartel people. We had it closed captioned. You have to take a look at this.”

  I let out a breath as Perrine appeared on the screen. He was wearing an impeccably tailored tuxedo, standing at a podium in what looked to be some kind of ballroom.

  The last time I had laid eyes on him, he was in a prison jumpsuit, escaping from a Lower Manhattan courthouse in a construction-crane basket. It made my blood boil to see him back in his stylish finery, dressed to the nines again.

  I also noticed that he had gotten his nose fixed. Which sucked. I was the one who had broken it for him in a scuffle we’d had before I placed him under arrest. I had the funny feeling we would have another scuffle before this thing was done. But is that a good thing? I wondered.

  I watched as the psychopathic murderer smiled pleasantly, adjusted the mike, and cleared his throat.

  “I see myself as a historical figure,” Perrine said from the dais without the slightest hint of irony. “Like Pancho Villa or Che Guevara or the great Simón Bolívar, I am here to continue the Southern Hemisphere’s great tradition of rebellion. Only, I am more honest, more defiant, because I refuse to hide my ambitions behind the bullshit con game that is socialism.

  “I do not need to justify my actions. Especially to the Americans. Borders and laws, they cry. Supply and demand is my reply. They disrupt my business while it is their decadent sons and daughters who are my very best customers.

  “It is time,” Perrine said. “Time to stop fucking around. That is what I learned during my stay in the great United States. My brief stay.”

  The audience broke into applause and uproarious laughter at that one.

  I wanted to put my fist through the screen.

  “I see the US finally for what it is,” Perrine continued. “Just another rival, just another meddlesome obstacle to our ambitions. Where the Americans are weak, we will show our strength. We will not stop until the border itself is meaningless. We will spur on chaos until it is manifest everywhere, until even the American authorities are as cowed as the Mexican ones. Then and only then will we have free rein.

  “And by we, be sure that I do not mean old Mexico. I do not mean the sorry downtrodden, the blessed poor. Fuck the forever-useless, sniveling, ever-present poor once and for all, I say.

  “By we, I mean you and me—all the people ruthless and lucky enough to be in this room at this present moment. Tout le monde is ours for the taking, my friends! The world is turning, readying itself for new borders, new laws. I say we write them with the blood of our American enemies. What do you say? Who is with me? Who wants to be a billionaire?”

  CHAPTER 34

  THE SCREEN FADED TO black, and Parker closed the laptop, cutting off the sound of more applause.

  “Wow, I’m impressed,” I said. “That has to be the Gettysburg Address of maniacal narco-terrorists.”

  Emily nodded. “One of our informants who was at the dinner said that after his speech, Perrine expertly directed a PowerPoint presentation in which a precise military-insurgency plan of attack on the southwest US was laid out,” she said.

  “What?” I said, laughing.

  Parker nodded somberly.

  “I’m not kidding. Like a general, he referred to the cartel’s current troop strengths and provisions, its recruiting efforts. Ho Chi Minh was mentioned often and fondly.”

  “Ho Chi Minh? Now, please. I know he’s a threat, Emily, but Perrine’s out of his cocaine-smuggling mind. Or he’s just trying to get his guys going. There’s no way he can operate in the US the way he’s been doing it in Mexico. He knows that would be suicide.

  “Believe me, Emily. This guy is smart. You saw him there with his manicure and his silk bespoke attire. His tastes are pure French. He’s a gourmet, a real bon vivant with joie de vivre. He likes being alive.”

  “What you say is true, Mike, but he’s making some pretty audacious moves nonetheless,” Emily said. “Those two cops in El Monte were blown to pieces by highly trained paramilitaries—mercenaries, probably. Which is troublesome when you consider that some of our analysts are saying the cartels employ upward of fifty or sixty thousand people.

  “Plus, you heard the speech. Drugs seem to be almost beside the point. He’s high on his own power. He seems like he’s drifted from egotistical drug smuggler into megalomaniac world conqueror. He’s French, all right. It seems he thinks he’s Napoleon.”

  “You have a point there,” I said.

  “Well, the good news is, this really isn’t the first rodeo for the US military against these narco nuts,” Emily said, twirling a pen in her fingers. “In Colombia in the eighties, Pablo Escobar actually went to full-blown war with the Colombian government. He blew up government buildings and an airliner before the Colombians asked for our help. The first George Bush sent in Delta Force, which tracked down the maniac for the Colombian army, who ultimately took him out.”

  “You’
re right. That’s true,” I said, brightening. “I forgot all about that. You’ve been around awhile, Parker. Were you involved in the Pablo Escobar takedown?”

  She turned and stabbed me in the arm with the pen.

  “Ow!”

  “Screw you, Bennett,” she said, affronted. “I’m younger than you are. In the nineties, I was in high school, dancing to Depeche Mode.”

  “It was a joke, Parker,” I said, rubbing my arm.

  “About my age,” she said.

  “My bad,” I said. “How about a toast?” I said, raising my coffee cup. “To history repeating itself.”

  “Hear, hear,” Parker said, tapping Styrofoam. “To Perrine in a body bag.”

  CHAPTER 35

  THE MORNING AFTER HIS dad left, Brian Bennett opened his eyes as he heard soft footsteps in the hallway. After a moment, the bedroom door slowly opened and Grandpa Seamus poked his head in.

  Uh-oh. Chore time. Has to be, Brian thought, immediately shutting his eyes and making what he hoped was a natural-sounding snore.

  “You’re up, Brian. Excellent,” Seamus whispered as he tugged hard on Brian’s earlobe. “Get dressed and grab Eddie and Jane, would you? I need to talk to you goslings in the kitchen about something.”

  “Are we in trouble?” Brian whispered back. “I already told Mary Catherine I was sorry about the strike, about a thousand times.”

  “No, no. It’s nothing like that,” Seamus said. “I just need to talk to you. You have five minutes. Move your butt.”

  Seamus had an apron on over his priest suit and had some scrambled-egg tortillas waiting for them when they entered the kitchen. Brian hesitated at the door when he smelled the bacon. Bacon was trouble. The bribe of bacon meant they were about to be made to do something even more heinous than he had imagined.

  “There you are! Carpe diem! Come in now, Brian. Be not afraid,” Seamus said.

  “What’s up, Gramps?” Brian said, finally taking a seat.