Drone

“What are you proposing?” Ali asked.

“Myers has satisfied herself with the syndicate’s blood. I don’t want to give her an excuse to kill me and my sons, too, like that idiot Castillo did.”

“Are you not worried that you will lose control of the distribution in the States?”

“Not as worried as I am about those Predators hunting me down. There will be time for that later.”

Ali saw the determination in Bravo’s searching eyes. The unassuming drug lord had little education yet he was smart enough and ruthless enough to build the second most powerful drug cartel in Latin America that, thanks to Myers, was now the most powerful. But Victor Bravo was still possessed by the habitual fear and wariness of a poor rural farmer so he was unable to fully appreciate the strategic opportunity that Ali had just handed to him. Ali knew there was no arguing with him or with the armed loyalists that surrounded him.

“I bow to your wisdom, jefe. I’m leaving for the training camp tonight. When the cycle is finished, I will take the men north and weed out the Maras as you have commanded. When that mission is accomplished, we will return to the training camp and wait for your instructions.”

“Excellent.” Bravo patted Ali on the back and nodded toward the pistol still in Ali’s hands. “I hope you enjoy your new toy.”

Ali flashed the golden weapon in his left hand. “With just one of these golden bullets, I can buy another wife.” He extended his free hand. They shook. Bravo held on.

“Just be careful where you point that gun, hermano. It may be made of gold like a whore’s necklace, but it is still dangerous.”

Ali smiled, nodded. “I understand, jefe.”

Ali carefully set the pistol back in its velvet-lined case and shut the lid, wondering how much damage a golden bullet would do to a high sloping forehead like Bravo’s.

26

Arlington, Virginia

Jackson secured permission from Early to bring Sergio Navarro into the loop. The young analyst had been the one to find the Facebook video that had cracked the Castillo case open, and he wanted to reward him with something far more valuable than just a commendation in his service jacket. Jackson knew that Navarro had a thriving Internet business on the side, providing his own proprietary search engine optimization (SEO) service for online vendors. The DEA could never hope to match the money that Navarro could earn in the private sector, but it could offer him something that a fat paycheck never could: the pride that comes with hunting down the bad guys. By bringing Navarro into the inner circle, Jackson was hoping to convince the brilliant young technician to stay in public service.

After César Castillo’s death, all of the SD cards found in the drug lord’s safe had been downloaded and transcribed. Unfortunately for Navarro, he was the one who had done the downloading and transcribing. It was practically a snuff film marathon: torture, beheadings, gang rapes, people set on fire, and, on rare occasions, a simple gunshot to the head of Castillo’s enemies by Castillo himself with his favorite jewel-encrusted silver pistol. Navarro felt filthy after watching each of the tapes and numb after finishing the last transcription.

Ironically, the very first video he watched was Pearce’s crudely shot phone video of Castillo’s death by nerve agent. Navarro hated it. It was medieval to execute a human being like that. But after watching the snuff tapes, Navarro became angry. He wished that Castillo had suffered more than he had. In fact, he watched Castillo’s death one last time to cleanse his psychic palate before he wrote up his executive summary.

The single most important piece of intelligence Navarro gleaned from the viewing came from the footage of the Marinas, burned alive in the tunnel with napalm. It had been shot by two men speaking Farsi.

Coronado, California

Pearce drummed his fingers on his desk, thinking.

César Castillo was dead and that was all that mattered to Early—and by extension, to his boss—but Pearce hated loose ends. His CIA career began in the Clandestine Service Trainee Program where he was trained to be a Core Collector, i.e., a disciplined intelligence case officer. He’d been taught to run down every clue, every source, every suspicion. On Pearce’s first day at the Farm, the instructor had passed out a sharp, flat-sided object to each student in the classroom. It was a nail, the kind used to shoe horses. Pearce had only seen them before in books.

“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,” the instructor had said, and she recited the entire proverb in her thick New Jersey accent. “But maybe that’s too literal for you postmodern, chaos-theory types. So I’ll put it to you another way. You want to keep the tornado from blowing your house down? Then you better go find the friggin’ butterfly and tear its wings off before it starts flappin’.”

Pearce not only couldn’t find the butterfly, he didn’t even know what the butterfly was.