Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

I’ve been worried about you.

I’m okay. Don’t worry.

Art hears the girl crying.

Where are you? The newspaper said The newspaper makes things up. I’m fine.

Can I come see you?

Not quite yet, darling. Soon. Listen, tell Mommy to give you a big kiss from me, okay?

Okay.

Bye, baby. I love you.

I love you, Papa.

Art looks to Shag.

“It’s going to take a little while, boss.”

It takes an hour but it feels like five, as the electronic data are sent to NSA and analyzed. Then they have an answer. The call came from a cell phone (we already knew that, Art thinks) so they can’t provide an address, but they can specify the nearest transmittal tower.

San Felipe.

On the east coast of Baja, straight south from Mexicali.

A sixty-mile radius from the tower.

Art already has the map spread out on the table. San Felipe is a small town, maybe twenty thousand people, a lot of them American snowbirds. There’s not much down there except the town, a lot of desert and a string of fishing camps to the north and south.

Even with a sixty-mile radius, it’s the cliched needle in the haystack, and Adan may have traveled to get into cell phone range and may even now be rushing back out.

But it gives us a target area, Art thinks.

Some hope.

“The call didn’t come from the town,” Shag says.

“How do you know that?”

“Listen to the tape again.”

They rerun it, and in the background Art can hear a faint hum with rhythmic pulses. He looks at Shag, puzzled.

“You’re a city boy, aren’t you?” Shag asks. “I grew up on a ranch. That’s a generator you’re hearing. They’re off the power grid.”

Art calls for a satellite sweep. But it’s night, and they won’t have the images for hours.

The interrogator picks up the pace.

He wakes Nora out of a deep Tuinol slumber, sits her in a chair and sticks the tracking device in her face.

“What’s this?”

“I dunno.”

“Yes, you do,” he insists. “You put it there.”

“What where? What time is it? I wanna go back…”

He shakes her. It’s the first time he’s touched her. It’s also the first time he yells. “Listen! I’ve been very nice to you so far, but I’m losing my patience with you! If you don’t start to cooperate I’m going to hurt you! Very badly! Now tell me who gave you this to put in the car!”

She stares at the little device for a long time, as if it’s some object from a distant past. She holds it between her thumb and forefinger and turns it around, examining it from different angles. Then she holds it up to the lamp and looks at it more closely. She turns back to her interrogator and says, “I’ve never seen this before.”

Then he’s in her face, screaming. She doesn’t even understand what he’s saying, but he’s yelling-flecks of spit hit her face-and shaking her back and forth, and when he finally lets her go she just slumps in the chair, exhausted.

“I’m so tired,” she says.

“I know you are,” he says, all softness and sympathy now. “This can all be over very soon, you know.”

“Then can I sleep?”

“Oh, yes.”

Art’s sitting there when the photos come across the computer screen.

His eyes stinging from fatigue, he wakes Shag, who’s sleeping tilted back in his chair with his boots up on his desk.

They pore over the photos. Starting with a large weather-satellite image of the entire San Felipe area, they cross off the section that is on the power grid, then start working their way through the enlarged vectors north and south of town.

They rule out the inland areas. No water supply, few passable roads, and the few roads that do snake their way through the rocky desert would allow the Barreras only one avenue of escape and they would be unlikely to place themselves in that trap.

So they concentrate on the coast itself, to the east of the range of low mountains and the main road, which runs parallel to the coast, with spur roads going east to the fishing camps and other small settlements on the beach.

The coast north of San Felipe is a popular spot for off-roaders and is pretty crowded with tourist, fishing, and RV camps, so they don’t give it much play. The immediate coast south of the town is similar, but then the road gets considerably worse and civilization becomes sparse until you get closer to the little fishing village of Puertocitos.

But there’s a ten-kilometer stretch between the two towns-starting about forty clicks south of San Felipe-where there are no camps, just a few isolated beach houses. The range is consistent with the strength of Adan’s cell phone signal, 4800 bps, so that’s where they concentrate their efforts.

It’s a perfect spot, Art thinks. There are only a few access roads-more like four-wheeler tracks-and the Barreras doubtless have lookouts posted on those roads and in San Felipe and Puertocitos as well. They would spot every single vehicle that came down the road, never mind the kind of armed convoy it would take to launch a raid. The Barreras would be long gone-by road or by boat-before we could get close.

But you can’t think about that now. First, find the target, then worry about how to take it out.

A dozen houses are set on the isolated stretch of coast. A few sit on the beach itself, but most are up on the low ridge above. Three are plainly unoccupied; there are no vehicles or recent tire tracks. Among the remaining nine it’s hard to choose. They all look normal-from space, anyway-although Art is hard-pressed to determine what abnormal would be in this case. All of them appear to have been built on lots cleared from the rocks and agave brush; most of them are plain, rectangular structures with either thatched or composite roofs; most of them Then he spots the anomaly.

He almost misses it, but something catches his eye. Something not quite right.

“Zoom in on that,” he says.

“What?” Shag asks. He doesn’t see anything where Art is pointing but rock and brush.

That is a shadow made by some rocks indistinguishable from the millions of others, but the shadow-the shadow is an even line.

“That’s a structure,” Art says.

They download the frame and enlarge it. It’s grainy, hard to tell, but examined under a magnifying glass there is depth there.

“Are we looking at a square rock?” Art asks. “Or a square building with a rock roof?”

“Who puts a stone roof on a house?” Shag asks.

“Someone who wants it to blend in,” Art answers.

They zoom back out, and now they start to spot other too-regular shadows, and pieces of brush that have even lines. It’s difficult at first, but then a picture starts to emerge of two structures-one smaller than the other-and shapes that could disguise vehicles underneath.

They coordinate the frame onto the large map. The house sits off a track that turns off from the main road, such as it is, forty-eight kilometers south of San Felipe.

Five hours later, a fishing boat beats its way up from Puertocitos through a heavy headwind. It anchors two hundred yards from shore, puts out its lines and waits for dusk. Then one of the “fishermen” stretches out flat on the deck and trains an infrared telescope on the beach in front of two stone houses.

He spots a woman in a white dress walking unsteadily down to the water.

She has long blond hair.

Art hangs up the phone, drops his head into his hands and sighs. When he looks up again, he has a smile on his face. “We got her.”

“Don’t you mean 'him,’ boss?” Shag asks. “Let’s not lose focus here. Getting Barrera is the point, isn’t it?”

Fabian Martinez is still in his cell, but he’s feeling a little better about life in general.