She turned back, recrossed the highway, walked to a street a block over, and started up the hill again, toward the downed cell phone tower. On the way, she passed a grocery store and a line of cars in the parking lot, people stocking up for a siege. As she walked by them, she noticed that each car had a sticker in the windshield, about half the size of a dollar bill—and all the cars were from Texas.
She swerved over for a closer look. Sure enough, Texas put its renewal stickers on the inside of the windshields, above and to the left of the driver. And each sticker, she found, had a tag number on it.
She continued up the hill. Two pickups peeled out of the cell tower lot as she approached it; the lot was surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence. The trucks headed east toward the roadblock—and also toward the cave where Kaiser would be holing up, if he’d gotten away with the mayor and city council.
The TV truck was still there at the cell phone tower, packing up. More pickup trucks went by on the highway, headed away from town, moving fast.
Letty checked one last time, then walked across the cell tower lot, slipping her DHS identification case out of her back pocket.Rodriguez looked up as she approached and asked, “Can we do something for you?”
“Yes. You can put me in touch with the government task force in El Paso. I’m with the Department of Homeland Security...” She held up her ID case so they could see the cards. “I know you can do that with this setup. One way or another, you’ve got to be talking to people. I’ve worked with these trucks before.”
Rodriguez: “Wait, wait, wait, there’s no way—”
“I’m not giving you a choice. You’ll find a way unless you want to go to federal prison for the rest of your life,” Letty said. She took the 938 out of her pocket, held it in her hand, pointing at the ground. “To make a point of how urgent this is, I’ll shoot you in the kneecaps if you say ‘no,’ so you’ll go to federal prison as cripples. Am I getting through to you now?”
Rodriguez and the camerawoman looked at each other, and then the woman said, ‘You don’t look like—”
“Because I’m trying to stay out of that jail they’ve got going down there,” Letty said. “Now: how does this work? There must be somebody from the task force looking at your signal as soon as it goes into a TV station...”
“You could get us killed,” Rodriguez said. “These people aren’t fuckin’ around. They could turn on us, if they thought...”
“That’s your problem: killed later or shot now,” Letty said. “Your choice. Besides, I don’t hardly think they’d kill their PR team. Especially if the PR team keeps their mouths shut until this is all over.”
Rodriguez got in the truckand called the station; there was some back and forth and then he crooked an index finger to call Letty over. He handed her a pair of earphones and the microphone that had been clipped to the camera.
“You’re on,” he said.
Letty said, “Don’t go away. I want to be able to see both of you. Neither one of you can outrun a nine-millimeter slug.”
Without thinking about it, she’d been talking into the microphone, and a man asked, “Who is this?”
Letty said, “I’m a DHS investigator in Pershing. Who is this?”
“Oh my God. Wait, I gotta, I gotta make a phone call, we’re gonna have to figure out how to... hang on...”
She could hear some fumbling around at the other end of the link and she kept her eye on Rodriguez and the camerawoman. Then a man’s voice, not loud, but who she recognized as the first unidentified man from earlier in the day, asked, “Letty?”
“Yes. This is me. They blew the cell phone tower.”
“We know that...”
“They’re getting ready to blow the bridge. You’ve got to keep the caravan off the bridge. I think they’re going to blow it up when they try to cross it.”
“Okay, that’s interesting. Tell me why you think that?”
She explained about the number of bridge sections, about the camoed men going under the bridge, the numbers of spans and support columns and the numbers of detonators and timers. “I can’t be sure, but I believe that’s what they’re planning to do.”
“We’ve had people call us and say that they were planning to come out peacefully, more or less...”
“You believed that?” Letty asked.
“No, I didn’t. Some people think it has to be considered as an option. We’ve also had reports that they plan to crash the Mexican side and disappear into the backcountry there.”
Letty said, “Right.”
“Then what are they going to do?”
“I’m about ninety percent sure they’re going to blow the fucking bridge,” she snapped. “After that, I don’t know.”
