IGMS Issue 9 (14 page)

"Members only, Miguel." He led Miguel to the door. "Members only."

Jet lag was usually not a problem for Miguel, but it was killing him three days later on the morning of the G10 commencement in Tokyo. He had just managed to fall asleep when a high-priority call came in -- the only type besides Sandro's that he allowed at 3 a.m.

It was his new boss, Marianne.

He levered himself up in his hotel bed and took three deep breaths before tonguing the accept.

"Rich said you wanted to know right away," Marianne said.

Miguel stood and walked to the window, his brain refusing for several long moments to remember the picture of the lawyer he'd sent to Rich Carlsen the other day. Marianne's tone made her words sound like an apology, but the truth was she'd somehow intercepted Miguel's request and wanted to show him she was the one in control. She was like that.

"It's for Sandro," Miguel said in a hoarse croak.

"I gathered, which is why I allowed it. But I won't do it again, Miguel, even for my new head of photos."

"It's
one
search, Marianne."

"It's one more reason for legal to crawl up my ass,
Miguel
. And that ID subscription doesn't pay for itself. It comes out of
my
budget."

"Okay, okay. I get the idea." Miguel softened his tone. He was tired and cranky, but he didn't need his new life at corporate getting off on the wrong foot. "What did Rich find?"

"The guy was a lawyer, one Hilden Gramercy."

"
Hil
den?"

"Yeah, go figure. Works for an outfit called Ernst, Grobel, and Spitz out of Dallas."

"Profile?"

"They've got over two dozen lawyers on staff. Apparently Gramercy's a junior member, only been with them for couple of years."

"Okay, now comes the million dollar question: what was he doing at my grandfather's?"

"You requested an ID, amigo. You'll have to take over from there." There was a brief pause. "Now get some sleep. You have a G10 to cover for me in the morning."

Miguel hung up and checked for Sandro's online presence. It was evening back in Vero Beach, but Sandro's avatar was grayed out, which was odd since he usually left it active 24/7. He called Sandro's apartment. No luck. Miguel found himself annoyed that he hadn't pushed harder for Sandro to buy an embedded phone.

Miguel flopped on the bed, exhausted but beyond sleep. He felt miserable. He'd felt miserable for the last three days. That had been the wrong way to tell Sandro about his promotion, but he'd never been able to find a right way. Sandro always twisted it to look like Miguel was abandoning him.

The thing that bothered him most was Sandro's easy acceptance of the news. Why hadn't he done the same thing as before? What had that lawyer dropped off for Sandro?

Suddenly Miguel realized he might be looking at this the wrong way.
Sandro
might have contacted
the lawyer
. He and his online cadre of armchair politicos were always preaching that they needed to do something, to take a stand. Maybe he
had
taken a stand.

Miguel accessed Sandro's banking account. Why hadn't he thought of this before?

There was twelve-thousand in his checking, ninety-three in savings, and another forty-eight in his IRA. That would be about right. But when he went to the transaction history for Sandro's checking account, his feet went cold. He sat up in bed with his legs over the side of the mattress and stared at the display.

Seven-hundred-thousand dollars had been deposited two days ago. That same day, it had been transferred to an account held by the Bank of Ireland (I.O.M.) Ltd. Miguel tried accessing the account using Sandro's credentials, but was refused access.

He returned to Sandro's account. The last activity, posted only twelve minutes after the transfer to the Bank of Ireland, was the purchase of an airline ticket to Nogales, Arizona.

He tried Sandro's phone again.

Nothing.

He packed immediately, booking a scram to Nogales and then sending four messages to contacts that might have some clue about Ernst, Grobel, and Spitz. He sent another message to Sandro's bank, disputing the deposit. Hopefully he'd be able to find out where it had come from.

He sent one last message in the cab to a private photog forum, offering a subcontract for the G10 meeting, enabling a trigger so that when someone accepted, another message would be sent to Marianne with the relevant details.

She was going to be pissed, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had to find out what was going on with Sandro.

When Miguel stepped out of Nogales International some six hours later, a news crew was filming outside baggage claim. Traffic through passenger pickup was much higher than he thought it was going to be -- an artifact of the latest goings-on, he supposed -- and he was surprised to find a line of white, unmanned cabs standing alongside the noticeably shorter line of yellows manned by greasy-looking Latinos.

He snapped a photo, the white line noticeably longer than the yellow, and labeled it,
The Cabby -- still holding strong in rural America.

Most people chose the real cabbies, especially in smaller cities like Nogales, but Miguel was in a hurry, and the annoying
Norteño
music coming out of several of the yellows made him walk that much faster and duck into the front seat of one of the whites.

The video screen built into the windshield lit up, flashing the Advantage International Shuttle logo. Then an attractive Latino woman with an attractive Latino voice appeared in the display and said, "Where can Advantage take you today?"

A call came in while Sandro was rubbing his eyes. Crap. It was Marianne again. She'd called twice while he was in transit. He routed the call to voicemail and glanced at his watch. Nearly 7 p.m. local time. He'd have enough time to head back to the hotel and take a look around Nogales before crashing.

"Sir?" the cab said.

He leaned back into the comfortable leather seat and said, "The Montezuma Hotel, on Escalada."

"Ah, very good. Then please buckle up. We'll be there shortly."

The cab turned south on I-19 and headed for the city. The sounds of the road fell away as Miguel pulled up the latest newsfeeds.

Tempers along the border had flared while he'd been in Japan. Human rights groups in both Mexico and the U.S. had converged on Nogales. Most held marches, organized and unorganized, near the border walls and the downtown area and at the crossing from the U.S. into Mexico.

But one group took a bolder stand and had been helping dozens of Mexicans cross the border. They'd found a weakness in the RFID firing software: they wouldn't fire at a target when someone with a valid U.S. RFID was standing nearby, and so they'd set up ferrying points along the border. Five or six simultaneous crossings were organized each night. Most were foiled, with many arrests made for each, but one or two of these "Big Brother" crossings, as they'd come to be known, would succeed, and it was beginning to fuel the opposition to the Border Patrol's new system.

For the last two nights, resistance to the BP officers' arrests had escalated beyond the boiling point. Firearms were involved, and the police, rightly so, had protected themselves. The results: five dead, eighteen wounded.

Miguel had called the police and all the hospitals he could readily find the numbers to after boarding the scram in Tokyo. Something in his gut twisted every time he forwarded Sandro's picture and asked if Sandro had been found among the dead or wounded. Miguel had let out a long, thankful breath when all of them replied no. He thought of making contact with Sandro's online chat group, but was embarrassed to realize he'd never kept track of where Sandro surfed, or the identities of his online fraternity.

The cab dropped Miguel off at the New Montezuma Hotel, a few blocks north of the wall. He checked in and headed south, but slowed when he saw a crowd.

Along International Street, the street that hugged the U.S. side of the wall through most of Nogales, two lines of protesters were marching, one on either side of the street. Something must have happened only minutes ago, because there was a crowd of people in the center of the street, the two halves being dismantled by a dozen police. Miguel snapped a couple of shots, though he could already see three news teams on the scene. Doubtless there were ten more photogs like Miguel sprinkled throughout the crowd.

Miguel pressed forward just as the police were zipping people's wrists and packing them into the waiting vans. The next few moments passed by in slow motion, Miguel snapping frames the whole time.

An Anglo woman -- five-six maybe, weighing a buck and a quarter, tops -- was browbeating this hulk of a man. The woman's face was beet red, and she was choking back tears as she shook a papaya-sized hunk of asphalt at the man. "My son died because those animals snuck across in the middle of the night and needed a car!"

The guy, Mexican by the look of him, went two-fifty and ninety-five percent lean. He was wearing broken-in jeans, a black tee, and a cowboy hat. He looked calm, like he wanted the woman to do something with the asphalt.

"When he stopped at a light," she shouted, "they shattered his window with this!" Her knuckles were bone white as she shook the asphalt at him again. "They dragged him out of his car, beat him to death, and took off, all before the light turned green!"

The man smiled. "
I'm
Mexican," the man said without a trace of an accent. "Does that mean
I'm
going to kill children?"

"Maybe not --" she shook the asphalt at the wall "-- but your Godless
indios
over there will if they're given the chance!"

"Yeah, and maybe I'll tell them how to get to your house."

That's when Miguel saw him.

Sandro.

He was standing at the back of the crowd on the far side of the street, watching. Miguel snapped a shot immediately, but the woman got in his way. She'd lifted the asphalt high over her head while the man glanced nervously at two cops who were zip-tying a nearby protester's wrists. The woman heaved the asphalt as hard as she could. It caught the man just above his left eye socket and sent his head sharply backward. He went limp and fell over like a giant redwood. His cowboy hat tumbled between legs as his head thumped against the street.

Miguel backed up and scanned the crowd for Sandro. He kept the shutter release clicking -- no telling what the camera might see that he would miss. The crowd noise intensified. A handful of people fought their way forward in defense of the woman, a few more for the man. And then the lines on either side of the street stormed forward like warring packs of wolves.

The police didn't stand a chance.

As it turned out, neither did Miguel, because by the time the violence had eased, Sandro was nowhere to be found.

The buff Mexican, Miguel found out that night, had been taken to intensive care with intracranial hemorrhaging. Three had died, one from a severe reaction to the tear gas, two by trampling. Forty-seven more had been wounded. The woman ended up in jail on charges of assault, but hadn't received so much as a scratch.

The chaos of the riot, the shouting, the screams of pain, and the tantalizing closeness with which he'd missed finding Sandro all spelled sleeplessness for Miguel. He stayed up until four drinking single village
mezcal
and
horchata
and scanning the riot pictures for Sandro. He found only two pictures that had something resembling a clear shot of Sandro. One was obscured by the woman and her damn asphalt, and the other caught only the back of Sandro's head, but in both there was the telltale sign of a cane among a veritable sea of legs.