“I will, I will. I just want a first crack at it.”
We checked in and pulled our carry-ons the fourteen miles through the casino to the elevators—this space much more pristine and elegant than my stay at Circus Circus—and went to our room. I hooked up my laptop, but saw no message from the Taskforce.
Jennifer said, “Waiting here isn’t going to make it come faster. Let’s go get some dinner.”
I agreed, and we went to a steakhouse on the ground floor. It was hellaciously expensive, but I was going to charge the Taskforce. Over steaks, I told Jennifer everything Knuckles had found, and we finished mostly in silence, both thinking through the day’s events.
When we got back to our room, I immediately checked my computer. I had a message:
Vehicle is a 2017 Chevrolet Express van. Reported stolen two weeks ago from a plumbing supply company in Salt Lake City. Located yesterday near Papago Farms, Arizona, on the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation. Van was destroyed by fire.
I googled the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation. I took one look at the location and sat back.
Jennifer said, “What is it?”
“The Ghost is in Mexico.”
Chapter 17
The Ghost sat in a chair three rows back from the entrance to Gate 17, the digital board proclaiming Aeroméxico Flight 28 to Buenos Aires, Argentina. The flight didn’t leave for another forty-five minutes, but he had nowhere else to go, unless he decided to run. And he was thinking hard about that decision.
In what seemed like years ago now, when he’d made initial contact in his private cell, he’d fantasized about how he would be freed. He thought about the reach of the Iranian Quds Force and the secrecy with which he was being held and had an image of clandestine assassins dressed in black penetrating the cell right under the noses of his captors. What had occurred had been completely the opposite.
He’d had plenty of time to reflect, as they’d driven through the night and into the next day, with the Ghost still unclear if he had been saved or was facing something worse. The men spoke little to him. The driver—called either Tusk or Pinky, depending on who was doing the talking—stated that he’d been saved, but the passenger—Flynn—showed him not a whit of concern.
The Ghost had been held captive a few different times in his life—once by the hired muscle of Hezbollah—and didn’t fear for his life—yet. He’d learned from his past that if they’d wanted to kill him, they would have done so alongside Marley. What he didn’t know was if they were like the Hezbollah thugs and transporting him to a much grimmer fate.
If so, he would bide his time and teach them a lesson, just like he had with Hezbollah. They would learn it just before they died.
They’d made the usual jokes about his slight stature and thick glasses, and he let them, lulling them into thinking he was no threat. Eventually, they’d stopped at some godforsaken outpost in a desert, and he’d been handcuffed in a stifling concrete shed with a metal roof. Flynn had given him an envelope and said, “Read it.”
He’d opened it, finding a letter written in Arabic, the words giving his system a shock. He’d looked up at Flynn, who’d said, “Don’t worry. I can’t read that monkey shit and don’t care what it says. As long as they pay.”
He’d left the shed and the Ghost began reading. At first he felt it was some sort of trick. What he was reading couldn’t be real, but it was, in handwritten black and white. It was from his old masters in the Iranian Republican Guards Corps. The Quds Force assassins. They’d heard his messages and freed him from prison. He had no idea how they’d used an American biker gang, but they had.
The letter told him to follow all instructions from the man known as Flynn, and they would provide documentation and transportation to link up. Until then, he was at Flynn’s mercy.
Shane had come in while he was reading and dropped a case of bottled water and a box of granola bars next to his cot, then left him alone. Two hours later, Flynn had entered with a short American Indian he’d called Chief, a stocky guy with a long ponytail of black hair and a cleft palate that gave his face a misshapen appearance.
Chief had worked with him to create forged documents to get into Mexico. The following day, Flynn had returned with another man, a Latino called Taco.
The Ghost would have thought the name an insult, but Taco didn’t seem to mind. He’d given the Ghost a Tohono O’odham tribal identification. It was a temporary one, without a picture, but it looked official. Flynn had unlocked his handcuffs for the first time and said, “Take all instructions from Chief and Taco and you’ll be free soon.”
He’d been driven to a location Chief called the Papago gate, which wasnothing more than a trailer next to a hole in the border fencing. Chief said, “Only Tohono O’odham members can cross here. They can come and go as they please, but the border patrol tracks it. The CBP records who crosses, but doesn’t ask for a reason. Nobody can get back into the United States who didn’t register on the way out, so they keep a tally.”
Taco smiled at him and said, “Since you’re a one-way trip, that doesn’t really matter, does it?”
They exited the vehicle and Chief said, “They’ll run our cards through a machine. For you, since your card is temporary and not yet in the system, they’ll take a fingerprint.”
The Ghost balked and said, “Fingerprint? A forged document is one thing—especially since it doesn’t have my picture—but biometrics is something else entirely.”
Taco said, “You want to stay here? Where you have nothing? Or go to Mexico, where your passport is waiting with your friends?”
The Ghost thought about it, and Chief said, “It’s only a local network. The tribe doesn’t let them use the prints for anything like law enforcement. You’re on Papago land, and they’re just visiting. Technically, you’re not even in the United States. We allow them to be here.”
He relented. They entered the trailer, finding a single Customs and Border Patrol officer sitting behind a desk watching YouTube on a computer screen. On the desk was a card reader device and the leftovers of a homemade sandwich. The man stood up, closing YouTube and bringing up another program. Chief slid in his card, saying, “Hey, Bill.”
Perfunctorily, Bill watched the screen, then said, “Next.”
