Crossing the Line (13 page)

I didn’t mean to do it gently, but even I was surprised by the result. With coffee slinging an arc in the air, Tom spun through the blanket covering the door, crashed through the door itself—it opening rather than breaking—and staggered, lunging, out onto the porch. He almost regained his balance there. But then either the sudden light or his high riding heels caught him up and he went—bent forward almost ninety degrees and with tangled legs churning—down the steps to hit the dirt face-first.

I was out the door right after him, into the heat and the wind. I was aware of Mary shouting behind me but didn’t bother to listen to the words. I stood at the top of the steps and waited for Tom to get up.

He did so slowly. He got to one knee and then his feet, dusting his palms on his jeans as he rose. His eyes were fixed on mine.

“C’mon, QuickDraw. I’ve been looking forward to this.”

He motioned me forward with both hands, then took a sideways karate stance.

“Hai!”
he grunted.

I felt a grin tightening my face.
A karate-boy. The most ridiculous of all street fighters
. I remembered Dad’s advice about them.
Get close and they’re finished
. My field of vision grew wide, taking him in entirely and ready to perceive the slightest attack or feint. Sound faded under the building roar of pounding blood.

In my head I instantly calculated how I would block and step around the expected side kick. How I would knee him in the groin as his leg was still in the air, how I would bang my right elbow into his jaw.

As I stepped forward off the porch to do these things, I was grabbed from behind. The arms wrapping around my arms and chest were surprisingly strong. They lifted me back, pulling me off-balance. Dragging me back toward the door.

I jerked my arms up and easily broke the hold. Behind me, Mary grunted. Then she darted around me before I could take a step back down toward Tom, who still held his kata pose. Mary shoved at my chest with her hard little fists.

“Stop it!” she yelled at me. “Stop it! Or you won’t be able to help your brother! We’ll have you taken out of here!”

“Who’s going to take me out of here? You two? You have no authority to be doing this in the first place!”

Her face changed colors. To a paler shade. She looked over her shoulder at Tom, then back to me.

“We have authority,” she said in a quieter voice. “You need to listen to me now.”

ELEVEN

B
efore Mary Chang was sent to San Diego, all she’d ever done was Financial Crimes. She was good at it—good enough to be a rising star within the Bureau. Paper-chasing corporate bad guys made big headlines, and the Bureau has always loved headlines. Among her coups was a Senate investigation of U.S. banking giant Citibank, which was criticized for policy lapses that allowed the laundering of drug money from Mexican kingpins and politicians. It goes without saying that a female Asian American also looked good representing the traditionally white male agency on both the perp walk and the witness stand.

She spent two years in the New York field office, and then another three in Washington that came with a promotion. Her gun was useful to her only as ballast for her purse; her primary weapon was an HP business calculator. The quarterly firearms testing on the range was a formality, like the sexual-harassment training all agents had to sit through.

They wanted to promote her again, but someone high up thought she might need a little seasoning—some street experience—in order to round out her résumé. There was a position open with the joint task force of narcotics agents in San Diego, so they pushed her in that direction. She went there knowing next to nothing about drugs or violence, but fully aware what a trophy Jesús Hidalgo’s head would be if the task force brought him down. It would make an already promising career go from gold to platinum.

For several years already Hidalgo had been eluding the American authorities. Ever since he destroyed his primary rivals, the Arellano-Felix organization, he’d become the Feds’ main target in the War on Drugs. The task force, of which Tom Cochran had been a member since its inception, believed he was responsible for a quarter of all the cocaine and methamphetamine shipped into the United States via the Border Region. But even though they knew who he was and what atrocities he’d committed, in two years of trying they’d failed to find a shred of admissible evidence that could be used to secure an indictment against him.

Three things kept him beyond their reach: the layers of lieutenants,
bajadors,
and mules he used for transporting his drugs; the menace of the
sicarios
and bangers he employed for threatening or killing those suspected of talking about him; and his generous “donations” to Mexican government and judicial officials who, even without the influence of fear and bribes, were loath to extradite Mexican nationals to the United States. Hidalgo appeared untouchable.

Mary helped develop a plan, though, that got them close.

Rookie agent Damon Walker had grown up in the barrios of San Diego. It was the place the man known as Shorty, Hidalgo’s primary headhunter, used as a recruiting ground for gunmen and mules. Damon had been a troubled kid, and he’d run around with gangs before his mother yanked him out of the neighborhood and sent him to live with his grandparents in New Jersey. There he straightened up, spent four years in the Air Force, another four in college, before he went through the Academy and became an FBI agent. Mary’s plan was to send this rookie back into the neighborhood he’d originally come from, where he was still remembered, and where he could begin to make buys that he claimed he was reselling to connections in New Jersey.

As he established a reputation as a dealer, he began purchasing larger and larger amounts of cocaine, heroin, and crank. The bigger loads got him meetings with people higher up in Hidalgo’s organization. He was working his way through the messy hierarchy with money, élan, and enormous courage. He was hunting for the one the Feds could pressure into turning.

Damon would meet with the agents who worked as his handlers—Mary, Tom, and two other, older agents—every third night. On these occasions the drugs were bagged and tagged and Damon was given more cash for both flashing and making the next buy. His statements about his activities were videotaped. Likely candidates for conversion were discussed.

These debriefings took place in an apartment Mary rented in San Diego. Living there, she played the role of his wild
chino-gringo
girlfriend. To get in character the young Financial Crimes analyst had her black hair streaked with blond, picked up a new wardrobe of short skirts and leather, and had her eyebrows pierced. She even pricked the insides of her arms with a pin to make it look as if she enjoyed shooting up and didn’t mind flaunting it. After the debriefings, Mary and Damon would substantiate their cover by hitting local bars. There they would make sure they were seen acting very much unlike federal agents: dancing, drinking, fighting, and pretending to make out in darkened booths.

It was fun. It was a thrilling game for a previously shy, introverted girl like Mary.

Tom and the other two handlers on the team would follow Damon in relays, not tailing him but looking for tails that might indicate he was suspected. The rest of the time, like when Damon was making his buys, the surveillance was either very loose or nonexistent. Nobody wanted to risk a slip that might clue Hidalgo’s men in to the fact that Damon was really a cop. So there were no hidden cameras, no body mikes, no eyes in the sky. All there was to document the operation were the videotapes of the debriefings and the purchased drugs. The only person the team reported to was the Deputy Assistant Director of the Criminal Investigative Division of the Bureau.

The operation was so secret that none of the other federal agencies involved in the task force were told about this part of it. No one was trusted outside of Mary, Tom, the two other seasoned FBI agents, and the top executives at the Hoover Building. Not the DEA, not the Border Patrol, not the local police agencies, and certainly not the cooperating Mexican agencies. In the process, through all the tension and excitement, the tiny team became close and intimate. They all became friends.

Then one night Damon didn’t come out of the Mexicali bar Tom had watched him go into. After four hours Mary was called to the scene. She prepared to go into the bar with her streaked hair, flashy clothes, and the attitude of a jealous addict, demanding to know where the hell her man was. It was the first real undercover role she was to play—this was the real thing, not just covering Damon and the meets by publicly dancing and fighting with him. Mary was keyed up as well as scared. But when she blew in through the barroom door, there was no one there. Not even a bartender.

Apparently everyone had slipped out the back, which hadn’t been watched as a standard part of the intentionally loose surveillance.

Despite frantic searches, despite pulling in every witness they could think of and coming down on them hard, and despite bringing in the DEA and finally even the Mexican authorities, Damon didn’t reappear for a week.

That was when they found his body draped over a fence north of town. He was bent over it backward, his upside-down face looking toward the border. His throat was cut, of course—
la corbata
—and his spine had been severed with a blow from a chisel. The coroner said he’d drowned on his own blood. There were other evident signs of earlier torture, too.

A brief whirlwind of indignation degenerated within days to finger-pointing at the Hoover Building and even the White House. The faces there were red, not from anger, but embarrassment. A lot of government money had been invested in the operation. Millions of dollars, in fact. Millions that had been used to buy drugs and fill a drug lord’s coffers. And the other agencies were furious that they hadn’t been trusted with the details of the operation in the first place. If they had been allowed to participate, they insisted, this never would have happened. An FBI agent would never have been killed. The Bureau had bungled it, they claimed. Yet again. Just like all the Bureau’s other recent disasters. For the suits in charge, the loss of face was worse than the loss of an agent.

Until then the killing of an American law-enforcement officer had been taboo. Only once had a cartel killed an American cop, a DEA agent a decade and a half ago, and the resulting pressure had nearly destroyed their industry. Since then, it had become a line that even the most arrogant of the cartels didn’t dare cross. The fact that Jesús Hidalgo now had crossed it—leapt over it and pissed all over the ground without any apparent concern for the potential consequences—was the greatest blow of all.

So the operation was shut down as quietly as possible. A plan was set up to minimize the damage to the FBI’s reputation. It was easy to do because the team was so small, and the only evidence was the tapes and the drugs and a whole lot of missing money.

The cover-up was simple: Justice Department sources told the media that the dead agent had been turned by the narcos, and that he had been the target of an investigation himself. He had died as the Bureau was readying to arrest him.

Mary and Tom and the other agents protested vehemently. They were told to shut up and follow orders. For the good of their country. Someone came in from the Attorney General’s Office to explain to them that the risk of further embarrassment to the FBI was too great—as was the risk of embarrassing our NAFTA trading partner by exposing the way Hidalgo lived and trafficked south of the border with impunity—for the Feds to pursue the murder. Things would be better this way. And even more important, they later learned, the political party in charge was doing everything it could to recruit Mexican-American voters before the next election, and the party leadership knew they would fail to do so if they embarrassed the government of the immigrants’ ancestral home. It would make them look anti-Mexican.

It was shut down, but it wasn’t over. At least not for Mary and Tom. The two older agents resigned in protest—they both had more than twenty years in and a pension—but Mary and Tom were too young and too ambitious. And too outraged.

They made a pact: They would get Hidalgo, no matter what. Even if their bosses, along with Jesús Hidalgo himself, had forgotten that it was the cardinal sin in the world of crime and punishment to kill a federal agent, Tom and Mary would remember. To them this was about law and justice, not politics. That was their authority: justice.

Although the case was more or less dropped by the American government, Hidalgo did take some heat in Mexico for the murder. It angered the other cartels who were unaware of the Justice Department’s laxity. They feared it would bring down more pressure from the antinarcotics agencies. So when their own
sicarios,
their purchased
federales
and state cops, and even their hired
generalísimos
in Mexico’s armed services came looking for Hidalgo with renewed intensity, he fled north to the safety of the country where he sold his drugs and whose agent he had murdered. If he was careful, he would be safe not only from violence but from the law as well. And he could live off his riches until Mexico welcomed back its most outrageous narco lord.

This, of course, was outrageous in itself. It was obscene. The man tortures and kills an agent of the United States of America and then takes refuge in one of those very states.

Mary and Tom had known for months about my brother’s pending immunity deal with the Attorney General’s Office. The entire task force was aware of it even though Mary and Tom and their supersecret operation weren’t a part of the negotiations with the lawyers in Buenos Aires that Mom and Dad had hired for Roberto. The two agents learned the details as they were placed on indefinite leave to grieve for their colleague and recover from the several frantic weeks that had followed his death.

They’d intercepted Roberto before he had a chance to turn himself in per the agreement. As far as the Justice Department was concerned, he was still a fugitive who’d reneged on his deal. Mary and Tom stashed him in a hotel room while they finished gathering the surveillance equipment, renting the hunting camp, and deluding my office into detaching me to join them.

In essence they’d kidnapped my brother. It was almost funny. FBI agents kidnapping a fugitive who was trying to turn himself in. McGee was right—she had balls.

“You know the old saying, better to ask forgiveness than permission?” Mary said toward the end of her story, her voice tight and pleading. But her apology was not meant for me or Roberto. “That’s what we’re doing here. We’re betting our careers that we can bring in Hidalgo. As a fait accompli, which will make everything okay. They’ll have to prosecute him. The Justice Department won’t have any choice. It would be more embarrassing to let Hidalgo go than to accept the political fallout. Once we have him in custody, on good, solid charges, they can’t let him go. His name has been in the newspapers for almost a decade. Everyone from the Attorney General to the Secretary of State has publicly called him the most notorious drug lord in the Western Hemisphere.”

“But we’ve got to have a case against him,” Tom said sullenly. “And your fucked-up brother is the only one who can deliver that.”

“We’re already racing the clock here. There’s not much time. Any day now they’re going to figure out what’s going on.” She meant the Justice Department. “Then they will come here and shut us down for good.”

I listened to the entire story in silence. I wasn’t surprised by the tale. I knew too well about the slimy entanglement of politics and justice. And I wasn’t surprised that these two uptight but ill-matched agents would risk their careers to do the right thing. They might break the rules—as I’d seen them do that with the listening devices, and as they had done by grabbing my brother in the first place—but they believed they were serving justice.

It was ironic that I thought of myself as one of them—good, righteous, an enforcer of the law—while I knew from what was in their file about me that they believed, or at least strongly suspected, that I was just the opposite. That I was very
bad,
in fact. Even now, listening to their story, it seemed a little strange that they’d want to ally themselves with me. I had to wonder if they were finally telling me the whole story. I didn’t like some of the looks they’d exchanged during the telling. I didn’t like the way Mary watched me, waiting for my reaction. And they’d lied to me before—by omission, at least, and by letting me believe that this was a fully sanctioned Bureau operation.