Crossing the Line (21 page)

TWENTY

T
he camera was a commercial one. Tom found it at a Circuit City store in Casper and paid for it out of his own pocket. There wasn’t the time—or even the ability—to get something more surreptitious and impressive from the Bureau. And Wyoming DCI, of course, still used big, inefficient 35 mms.

It was digital rather than film, would capture short video as well as still images, and was about the size of a deck of cards. It would also record sound. I was given the job of concealing it.

“Up his ass,” Tom suggested.

Roberto demurred with a smile at Tom but didn’t make any of the obvious comebacks.

Before deciding where to put it, I studied the recorded video showing my brother’s previous welcome to the compound. I watched all over again as Roberto was stripped, searched, and beaten. Roberto told me that he’d only been searched that one time, but he didn’t know if the same was true about his belongings. So the tape was all I had to go by in order to get a feel for how seriously the search was taken. Figuring out how to work the enlarger on the laptop, I zoomed in as Zafado dumped the contents of Roberto’s pack on the flagstone by the pool.

Zafado’s search was surprisingly thorough. But then I figured the narco probably had a lot of experience concealing things. In about two minutes he’d examined all the stuff on the flagstone, taken apart the small camp stove, shaken out the sleeping bag, and patted down the empty pack. He also took Roberto’s wallet from the pants that had been cut off him and went through it with particular care. I noticed that it was about a minute after this that Hidalgo finally—conveniently—showed up, pretending surprise and joy at seeing his long-lost friend and reprimanding his men for roughing him up.

Zafado hadn’t taken out the foam insert that gives shape to the part of the pack that lies against your back. It also protected your flesh against sharp objects inside the pack. Maybe Zafado didn’t know that the foam could be removed in climbing packs so that you could sit on it during an unplanned bivy on some icy ledge. The idea was that the foam would insulate your butt from the cold rock, and then you could shove your legs into the pack itself for warmth. I’d spent a lot of happy nights that way with Roberto. I hoped to spend a lot more.

I took out the sheet of foam. It was about three-quarters of an inch thick. I folded it tightly, then made an incision with a razor blade. After a little bit of careful shaving I was able to slip in the camera. It barely made a bulge.

The plan was that once he was back inside the compound and the house, Roberto would transfer the camera into his wallet. The wallet was already fat and messy, stuffed with cash in the currencies of four nations, some scrawled phone numbers and business cards that various girls had pressed on him during his South American sojourn, and other scraps with comments and illustrations—called beta—that described climbing routes.

Roberto approved of the plan.

“Better than Tomás’s idea, anyway,” he said loud enough so that Tom could hear. “Guy’s got a thing about asses.”

Mary gave the instructions.

“All we need is a picture of the laboratory in the mine. Take a series of them if you can. We don’t want the judge to think we’re trying to fake anything. That’s all you have to do, Roberto. Then you can leave the camera in the rock where Anton and Tom left you the note. We’ll pick it up there and take it to the judge.”

I didn’t like that part. But then I didn’t like any of it. Maybe, though, if I was very lucky, Tom would get peed on again.

After reading the instruction manual and downloading software onto one of the computers, Tom gruffly showed Roberto how to use the camera. How to shut off the flash, how to aim and focus, how to silence the beeping noise the camera would otherwise make, and how to delete the images in a hurry. Then the agent got away from my brother as soon as he could. He headed up to the ridge to monitor the surveillance equipment there.

For a little while Roberto ran around the main cabin like a hyperactive kid, taking practice pictures of everything from odd angles. Pictures of me, focused on the scar on my cheek over the rim of a coffee cup. Another picture of me, this time showing him my middle finger. A close-up of Mungo’s yellow eyes looking up at him just inches above her head and looking something like a furry halibut. A portrait of her nervous, toothy grin. But mostly he filled the disk with shots of Mary. Close-ups from different angles, all catching her unaware.

He was pretty good with the little camera, getting shots of things I hadn’t seen. For instance, I would see Mary sitting erect in front of the computer screen, her narrow eyes clicking back and forth as she read lines of text.
Snap
. Roberto would catch her tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, looking suddenly vulnerable and pretty. I would see her writing hard and fast on a legal pad in tiny, precise script.
Snap.
Roberto’s close-up of her hand showed small, elegant fingers caressing a page.

Mary finally got annoyed with his clowning around. She insisted that they get busy with serious matters. For the next four hours—the rest of the afternoon—she went over every detail of his two-day stay in Hidalgo’s house. Mary recorded every facet. Everyone he had spoken to, every word that was said. Next was a discussion of what ruses Roberto could use to get back into the mine for another tour. Then there was endless coaching on the exit strategy. How Roberto should allow himself to be arrested along with the others when we finally raided the place. How he should say nothing about his status as an informant to anyone. How the suspects would be separated in a yet-undetermined federal facility and, after a few days, she would come for him. How she would remove him on the pretext of taking him to Colorado to face the still-pending escape charges there.

The optimism disturbed me, but didn’t affect my brother.

“Better not forget about me, Mary” was all he said.

That was the only time all afternoon that she cracked a smile. It was a polite smile, not a true grin. Otherwise she was all business, as uptight and furiously professional as she’d been on the drive in from Salt Lake a week earlier. None of Roberto’s gentle joshing seemed able to soften her. She was a federal agent preparing an unreliable source for a hazardous operation. Nothing more. This had become a distasteful job, but she would do her duty. The only concession she’d made to any sort of informality was to change back into her shorts and a white sleeveless T-shirt.

I wandered in and out, fretting. I couldn’t get over a sense of impending doom.

As dusk was falling, Roberto was finally allowed outside. All day Mary had insisted that he stay indoors. To work, and also because of the fear that Hidalgo’s plane could return unexpectedly. “No risks” was still her official motto, but it had worn pretty thin with me.

Mungo and I were sitting up by the bouldering wall when Roberto emerged from the cabin. The air had cooled only a little since the sun dropped behind the tail end of the great Teton Range. The red earth and the gold stone had soaked up enough heat during the day that they would radiate like a furnace for half the night. Even sitting still I was sweating. Beside me, Mungo’s head was bobbing, keeping beat with her panting.

Roberto saw us and headed up.

“You working out?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“I was waiting for you.”

He laughed.

“You wouldn’t want to wear yourself out before I got up here, right,
che
? Want to look strong for your big bro.”

I rolled my eyes, but it was true enough. Some kind of adolescent carryover that the years couldn’t shake. Something I hadn’t lost even though I was a full-grown man, a college graduate, an eight-year veteran of Wyoming’s investigative police force, and responsible for the deaths of four other men, all of whom had been shot in self-defense even if no one believed it. Posturing for my brother was one of those things I would never grow out of.

As a kid I’d done everything I could to impress him. I remembered how every morning, for something like ten years, I did pull-ups on first waking, trying to get strong enough so that I could keep up. I would push myself hard on the climbs we did together, often taking ridiculous chances with gear and strength, to show him I could be as fearless as he was.

“Go ahead,” he said now. “Get on it. Show me something.”

Sitting in the shade, staring at the rock for a good part of the afternoon, I’d figured out some problems. Places where the overhanging shelf of stone had only tiny pockets like bullet holes for your fingertips and edges no thicker than dimes for your feet. We worked these for a while, one of us “spotting” with upraised arms while the other clung to the rock. The darkness grew until half the challenge was just finding the holds.

Roberto, as usual, kicked my ass.

Taking a break to shake out the lactic acid, I asked him, “‘The Wolf Who Wanted to Be a Little Girl’? What the fuck, ’Berto?”

He laughed. “You like?”

“Yeah. The drawings were pretty good. But the text—it was good, too, but it creeped me out a little, bro.”

He slapped my shoulder. “Give it to your daughter. Tell her it’s from her Tío ’Berto.”

That was all he’d say about it.

After a little while he told me, “I think I’ll sleep up here tonight. It might be a while before I get to sleep outside again, you know?”

I knew all too well. For the next few nights he would be in Hidalgo’s house—the lion’s den—then, if all went really well, he’d be in a jail cell for a few more days to weeks. Long enough that hopefully Hidalgo and his
sicarios
wouldn’t suspect him of being the rat.

“You mind bringing me my bag?”

“I’ll bring it. I think I’m going to get something to eat. You hungry?”

He shook his head.

With Mungo loyally dogging my heels, but looking back over her shoulder at my brother every few steps, I walked down the slope and into the cabin that held our bags and cots. I threw Roberto’s bag over my shoulder and went back out. I stopped on the porch, though, seeing Mary hiking up the hill toward Roberto and our rock wall. The timing was such that she must have seen me come down. She must have been waiting. So I didn’t follow her back up. I didn’t really feel like talking to her, anyway. It was her decision to put Roberto at grave risk. As if he weren’t already risking enough in his life.

Instead I left the bag on the porch and climbed up the other side of the crater to the notch in the ridge. I expected to find Tom stewing there, and, unfortunately, wasn’t disappointed. He didn’t say anything—didn’t even turn around—when Mungo and I pulled up to the rocky platform in between the junipers and stone walls. My greeting was answered with a grunt. I sat, waiting to be offered a peek through the camera, but Tom apparently didn’t feel like sharing.

So I picked up his low-light binoculars and looked across the crater to our bouldering shelf. I found Roberto and Mary, both glowing and green.

They must have made some kind of a truce, because I could see that he’d gotten Mary up on the rock again. I focused the binoculars on her. She was hanging onto some fat edges with her fingers, and her profile seemed to be scowling with concentration. Her thin calves were pumping up and down with the onset of sewing-machine leg. It comes with the first spurts of adrenaline, that nectar that my brother and I have spent almost all our lives chasing. She probably didn’t know it, but she wasn’t in any danger. Roberto stood beneath her, spotting, his bare arms upraised. I could see his mouth moving as he offered some half-mocking encouragement.

Mary slowly peeled off the rock. She dropped, turning for a moment into a green streak, a shooting star, before Roberto caught her under the arms. He bounced a little from the impact of her slight frame then put her on her feet. But she didn’t step away from him like I expected her to. And he kept his arms around her. They stayed motionless for a moment, her back to his chest. When she did move, she still didn’t step away. She just turned around in his arms to face him. It looked like she was still trembling the same way she had before she fell.

I put the binoculars down and smiled. For a few beautiful minutes, I was no longer scared. Not of Hidalgo, not for Roberto, not for what would happen between Rebecca and me.

After a little while I picked up the binoculars again. What I glimpsed in the green light before putting them down for good was pretty X-rated. This time I didn’t just smile—I laughed out loud and slapped Mungo’s butt.

Roberto was on his back, reclining on a boulder. Mary was crouched over his hips. Shorts gone, shirt pushed up above her small, high breasts. Her head was thrown back, her eyes—if they were open like her mouth—totally unseeing.

Feeding the Rat, I supposed, thinking of my brother’s term for getting a fix. In this case the expression had an interesting double meaning. She was taking that rush of sweet adrenaline she’d found on the rock even further. Feeling the blood pounding in her veins, feeling her stomach high and light in her rib cage. Involving herself with a guy like my brother was taking a big dose. It was probably only her second taste—and it was a gulp rather than a sip. Leaving the Bureau to start this whole thing with Hidalgo would have been the first taste. Now she was jumping right in, all the way. Next thing she’d be wanting to go with him to Yosemite or Patagonia.

How far would she push it?
I had to wonder.
How far would she push ’Berto?

TWENTY-ONE

A
s if to mock all my fears, they didn’t immediately search Roberto when he turned up from his “climb” back at Hidalgo’s compound. It looked like they might not search him at all.

I’d had a nightmare about watching it through Tom’s monitor as they discovered the camera. About being across the river and a half-mile downstream, totally helpless to do anything about it, unable to even shout a warning. In the dream I could see—looming large—the happy-faced sticker with the tongue hanging out that I’d seen on some of the narcos’ car bumpers. Only the face wasn’t anonymous and yellow with just dots for eyes and a wide slash for a grin. Instead it was a lot more like my brother’s.

Roberto was escorted to the front of the house by a banger with an automatic rifle. Presumably he’d picked my brother up on the several-mile-long driveway that led from the Forest Service road to Hidalgo’s compound. We knew that there was the camper parked by the road, and this seemed to confirm that it was manned. The kid wasn’t holding the rifle but let it dangle on its shoulder strap.

“Looking good,” Tom said into his radio.

Tom was squatting next to me in the notch, monitoring the camera and working with the microphone. I was using a pair of low-light binoculars. Mary was in the cabin below us, watching on the computer screen. She’d wanted to come up, too, but there wasn’t enough room for the three of us plus a one-hundred-pound wolf in the notch. Tom had to be there to run the equipment, and I’d insisted on being there so I could be as close to my brother as possible.

Roberto looked suitably scruffy. Just like he’d been doing a serious climb high in the Winds. I’d coached him about a route called Red BVD on Schiestler Peak that I’d scaled two years before. His hands were convincingly torn from bouldering the previous afternoon, and I’d kicked his nylon windpants and T-shirt in the dirt. I’d even cooked some oatmeal with the little camp stove in his pack and left remnants glued to the side of the pot.

Zafado came out of the house. In his role of security chief, I supposed. It looked like he was talking to my brother. Interrogating him, but nicely. Tom tried to get the long-range microphone zeroed in but couldn’t quite get it right. The house was between us. It, as well as the wind, seemed to be blocking the sound.

But everything looked all right. Roberto was nodding and grinning, raising his hands as he described imaginary moves on his imaginary climb. I could only see the back of Zafado’s head but he was nodding, too. Maybe even laughing.

“He’s going to be fine,” Tom informed me. “I’ll say this about your asshole brother—he knows how to bullshit.”

I said, with less good grace, “Shut up, Tom. Get that microphone on them.”

And I told myself,
Relax. Everything’s fine. No worries.

Then Bruto came out of the front door.

He looked a lot less pleasant than Zafado did. But that didn’t mean anything—he was such an ugly bastard with his big, swollen face and creased forehead. He stalked up to stand next to his
compadre
. Roberto greeted him, probably saying something smart-ass.

The talk in front of the house went on for a few minutes. Bruto and Zafado standing between Roberto and the front door, the kid standing off to one side and fiddling absently with his gun and his crotch.

Then a car seemed to come out of nowhere. It was one of the big black SUVs. A Cadillac Escalade, all polish and chrome. The headlights were turned off. I’d been so focused on my brother and the gathering in the driveway that I hadn’t seen the car coming. It must have been rolling with its engine off, because Roberto didn’t seem aware of it, either.

It came on fast, jerking to a stop just behind Roberto. He turned to look at it. As he did, a rear door popped open. No one got out, but Bruto stepped forward. He wrapped his huge arms around my brother and lifted him, pinning his arms to his sides. He carried Roberto two or three steps to the truck’s open door.

What the hell is going on?

The last thing I saw before Roberto disappeared into the SUV was his head snapping back. He seemed to throw it back with all the strength in his powerful neck. The back of his skull smashed into Bruto’s face. The big man paused, staggered, then roughly shoved Roberto into the truck.

The kid with the cheap machine gun—the one who’d been fondling his gun and groin—was suddenly bouncing up and down in excitement. Yelling something, too, but I don’t know what because Tom couldn’t get the damn microphone working. Zafado was grinning his toothy grin. He had his chrome-plated automatic out now and was pointing it into the SUV. Beside him Bruto was holding his face and staring balefully into the truck’s interior.

Shit! Shit! Shit!
I wanted to scream. But I couldn’t make a sound.

Zafado climbed into the backseat with his gun leading the way. Bruto got into the front passenger’s seat, the truck sagging with his weight. Its lights still off, but the reverse lights filling the binoculars with a blaze of green, the truck turned around in the driveway.

Then, slow as a hearse, it headed up the road that led into the mine.

I flew more than ran down the steep slope. Being stupid, I knew—risking a broken ankle or neck—but I couldn’t help it. There was no putting on the brakes.

Inside the main cabin I was dazzled by the white light from the three bare bulbs. Mary’s face looked white as a ghost’s. She sat in front of an open laptop, staring at the monitor. The radio headset was over her ears and I could hear Tom’s tinny voice coming over it. Mary wasn’t responding.

“Did you see?” I wasted my breath by saying, or maybe shouting.

It took her a moment but she nodded. She didn’t turn to look at me, though. Mungo was pressing hard against my hip. I could tell the wolf sensed something very big and bad was happening, and that I hadn’t just leapt down the steep hillside for kicks. She’d never seen me this panicked. I tried to calm her—and myself—by stroking her head with a shaking hand.

“They took him, Mary. They took him. We’ve got to go in there. Now!”

Mary went on staring at the screen.

Tom came into the cabin. He was out of breath, too, and had the decency to look as shell-shocked as the rest of us.

“Is the camera still on?” he asked.

Mary slowly nodded.

“The car go into the mine?”

She nodded again, managing a quiet, “Yes. One minute ago.”

“Holy shit!” Tom said.

I wanted to shout at both of them—
I told you it was too risky. Too dangerous. But you sent him back in there. You made this happen.

But I still held on to enough sense to know that accusations and recriminations didn’t matter right now. I could play the blame game with them later. The thing to do right now was to get my brother out.

“We’ve got to go in there. Now,” I said again. “Call whoever you’ve got to call. Get them out here now!”

Without really knowing it, I was moving toward the table where Tom kept his toys, the scary-looking assault weapons. I had no idea how to fire a gun like that, but I intended to take one of them along anyway. They were both locked in their hard plastic cases. Tom had grown sick of Roberto ridiculing them and him.

“Give me the key,” I told Tom. I was jerking on one of the small padlocks.

“No.”

It was Mary who said it. She’d managed to both find her voice—barely—and turn away from the green screen. Her eyes looked almost wide.

“No,” Tom echoed. “Listen, Burns. We don’t know what the hell just happened. They might want to talk to him some more. Or have him do something in the mine. If we go in there with guns blazing, they’ll definitely kill him. No doubt about that. And there’s only one way we know of to get into that mine. They’ll know we’re coming from a mile away.”

For once the tough-guy growl wasn’t evident in his voice. He sounded like a pro now. For the moment. God, I hoped he really was. And I hoped he really knew how to shoot those things.

“Give me the key,” I repeated.

He shook his head. I let go of the padlock and faced him, torn between pleading with him and hurting him. At my side Mungo was so freaked out she was starting to growl. Her blade of a snout darted this way and that, looking for the threat. But Tom didn’t look like a threat. He stood ten feet away from me, his hands spread out with the palms toward me.

“No. We need to—”

I moved toward him. I’d take the key.

“Anton! We can’t go tearing in there,” Mary said, rising and standing in front of me.

Her chin was trembling. But her voice was stronger. I saw her fingers reach out to touch my shoulders but my flesh was completely numb.

She shook me. “We don’t know what they’re doing, Anton. We don’t know what they suspect or why. Or what they intend to do. The very worst thing we could do is go charging in there.”

That didn’t sound right to me. But I tried to listen. She was smart—I knew that. And I also knew that, unlike Tom, she liked my brother.

“We’re also grossly outnumbered here. And what we saw through the camera was illegal to view without a warrant. We have no legal authority to enter Hidalgo’s property. Not yet.”