Gregg Hurwitz - Troubleshooter

"You knew Smiles was already in Chief's hit binder, so when given the choice of targets, you picked him."

"Only way to make striker and ride with the crew," Rich said. "Cap a copper."

"You did nothing while a pregnant sheriff's deputy was shot point-blank in the chest." The intensity of the anger in Tim's voice brought Tannino upright in his chair.

Rich spread his hands, palms to heaven. "What the fuck was I supposed to do?"

The vehicle-cam footage remained vivid in Tim's mind. The twitch of Rich's scowl. You'd better back off, bitch. Tim registered the words now as a hidden caution. Rich's cry the moment before Dray stepped into range had not been an angry shout but a panicked warning-Get the fuck outta here! And after the shotgun blast, Rich's taut face and bared teeth were, Tim realized, an expression of horror, not atavistic release.

"Look, my hands were tied at the scene." Rich's cheek twitched; the guilt had been working on him. "I took a risk right after and made the anonymous call to the station that probably saved her life."

"Let me dust off a medal of valor for you," Tim said.

"My hands were tied. There were five of them."

Six if you count Marisol Juarez.

Tim picked up Dray's rebuke. "Six if you count Marisol Juarez."

"Who's that?"

"She was the Mexican girl on the back of Kaner's bike who we found disemboweled last night in a warehouse. You met her at the same time you let Den Laurey shoot Andrea Rackley right above her highly visible pregnancy. Guess your hands were tied there, too."

Contrition flashed on Rich's ragged face, a surprisingly soft expression beneath the scars and stubble. He shored himself back up, adjusting his eye patch with a snap that had to sting. "Some Mexican girl they killed doesn't make their top ten. These boys'd put a hole in someone's head just to have a place to rest their beer. A girl who got cut up is-sadly-the fuckin' least of it. I've got bigger responsibilities, a task force living on what I can feed them. I don't have the luxury of breaking cover just to get myself and their intended victim killed. There are bigger stakes here. I can't tell you the shit I've seen."

"You'd better start," Tannino said. "Right now."

The three FBI agents offered one another an array of eye contact that suggested staging, and then Smiles, the head suit at supervisory special agent, cleared his throat and said, "Allah's Tears."

Tannino said, "Huh?" with great annoyance.

"A new form of extremely fine heroin. The purest to hit our radar. It's a liquid concentration, translucent like water. AT's potency, compared to regular heroin, is off the charts. It takes an enormous amount of raw product-the output of hundreds of acres of poppy field-to yield a liter of this stuff. The chem jockeys worked out the production technology so that even saline-diluted to twentieth strength, a milliliter'll put you on the nod for six hours. It's highly addictive, makes black-tar withdrawal look like giving up ice cream for Lent. Easier to smuggle, too-requires minimal storage space. You mule in a fist-size shipment, dilute it, dole out drops in vials, and it'll go like wildfire."

Rich took up his hair in a fist, forming a makeshift ponytail. "Think the crack epidemic Supersized."

"But this product's even easier to move. Crack's appeal is that it's cheap to the consumer. This is economical for the distributor. And now AT's ready for a test run. L.A.'s the target market." Smiles traced his glistening, well-manicured mustache with a thumb and forefinger. "That's the good news."

"The bad news," Rich picked up without missing a beat, "is that this shit is straight from labs in southern Afghanistan. Affiliated with guess what loosely structured global Islamic terror organization? This particular Hydra head is a Sunni extremist group splintered out of Asbat al-Ansar, call themselves 'al-Fath.' Their guy on the ground in L.A. is Dhul Faqar Al-Malik, a Pakistani, alias is 'the Prophet's Sword.'"

Tannino's grimace said he knew the name. Al-Malik had probably achieved topic-of-discussion status at Head Feds briefings.

"He's the point man, tasked with establishing financial and operational footing so they can help generate sleeper cells and bankroll future operations in the city." Smiles paused, his dark eyes showing the depth of his concern. "We strongly believe that the Prophet has forged an alliance with the Laughing Sinners."

"Don't fundamentalist terrorists have greater concerns at this moment than dicking around with bikers and junkies?" Tannino said.

"A lot of their assets-particularly those in the U.S.-have been frozen since the post-9/11 crackdown. And since we put the screws to the banks, moving money across borders is harder. We've seized more money coming in than I'm at liberty to disclose. AT is the newest wrinkle. It eliminates the need for al-Fath to smuggle large quantities of heroin into the country, or money, and it also cuts the need to set up a false-flag operation." A hint of admiration found its way onto Smiles's face. "The money's made in L.A., and it stays in

"Until it funds God knows what," Rich said. "L.A.'s been the brass ring for the ragheads since the Towers fell. You saw the contingency plans they squeezed out of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed."

Malane offered a now-you-see-what-I've-been-dealing-with dip of the head. "The Sinners' drug-distribution network's already up and running-al-Fath's just tapping in to it. No start-up costs. No added exposure. In turn the Sinners get a cut of the action and an opportunity to corner the market on AT-everyone wins."

"As you well know," Smiles said, "no one on the West Coast can touch the Sinners when it comes to distribution."

Tannino lifted a crime-scene photo from his leather blotter-Cholo corpses baking in the Palmdale heat. "Especially now."

A little nod. "Especially now."

Rich said, "Since the U.S. invasion, opium production in Afghanistan is up two thousand percent."

Guerrera alone looked shocked. "What? Why?"

"Because the big producers are the warlords we backed to oust the Taliban," Tim said. "If we cracked down on poppy production, we'd suffer a backlash from our supposed friends."

Rich looked at him, as if puzzled by how a mere federal deputy could grasp international intricacies. Then another expression rippled across his face-something approximating respect-and he said, "You were there."

"Early days. Through the fall of Kabul."

"Army?"

"Rangers."

Smiles said, "The warlords control the areas where the poppies are grown, but they can't make it into heroin. They used to ship it to Pakistan and other neighboring countries for the refining process. But now it gets trucked to al-Fath-run labs in the nearby countryside, and the warlords get to keep more of the profits."

Guerrera again: "So the warlords helped us out until the terrorists made them a better offer."

Noting the frustration on Guerrera's face, Tim thought back to when he, too, had believed that there were clear sides in wartime, that allies aligned based on ideologies, that loyalty and consistency could be factored as part of a strategic equation. It was before he ever saw combat. Where he'd been deployed, the old rules hadn't held. And so now he found the Sinners no more surprising an addition than the Afghan warlords; the bikers were a terrorist-affiliated group as dangerous as any other. Just because they didn't cleave to a particular ideology hardly made them less menacing. Or easier to fight.

"For obvious reasons," Smiles added, "the shift to domestic heroin refining in Afghanistan has increased pressure for more efficient means of exportation. Thus Allah's Tears."

Night was at the windows and the fluorescents were headache-inducing. Tim's thoughts wandered to his wife, and he fought them back to the case. "Do you have a bead on the Prophet?" He read the disappointment on all three agents' faces; it was a case they'd been taking personally for a long time.