He rubbed his forehead and said, “Where is this suspect you got the information from?”
Jennifer closed her eyes, knowing what was coming, and not wanting to hear it. I said, “Yeah, about that. He’s in the trunk of my car. He’s called Chief and he’s running a forgery scam where he gets people across the Mexican border using temporary TO IDs.”
His mouth opened and closed with nothing coming out. We sat in silence for a moment. Finally, he said, “What the fuck, man! Am I supposed to arrest him for stealing a van in Utah?”
“No, I just told you, he’s running fake IDs to get people across the border. Please tell methat’sin your wheelhouse, Customs andBorderProtection?”
He shifted left and right in his chair, spluttering. He finally spit out, “I fucking knew you were trouble the moment you walked in my door. Fucking Homeland Security assholes think they can walk all over everyone!”
Jennifer leaned forward and said, “They attacked a federal agent. They tried to kill us.”
“Thenyouarrest them. I want no part of this. I have to live here, damn it.”
I’d had about enough of his shit. I stood up and put my hands on his desk, leaning into him.
I said, “That guy is involved in the cold-blooded murder of a sheriff in Utah. They killed him and left him to die on the side of a road. You asked who lumped me up, and I said you should see the other guy. Well, he’s the other guy. This isyourjurisdiction.”
I pointed into his face, my finger inches from his nose. “Do your fucking job.”
He backed down, saying, “Okay, okay.” He exhaled and said, “Is he really in your trunk?”
Jennifer nodded, trying to give some plausible reason why, saying, “We didn’t have proper restraints. It was the best we could do.”
He shook his head and said, “You’ll testify against him about assaulting a federal agent? Give me a statement about the incident?”
Which, of course, wasn’t going to happen. I said, “No. I’m not goingto be around. Don’t worry about me or the assault charge. Leave all that shit aside unless his buddies create a stink, then throw it on them, but they aren’t going to do that. Get him for the forgery stuff and leave me out of it. His friends aren’t going to bitch. If the TO police raise a stink, shut them down with accusations of them being complicit to the forgery stuff. I guarantee they turned a blind eye.”
He nodded, and I could tell he’d thought that the minute I brought up the forgeries. He said, “This isn’t the way we do things in CBP.”
I said, “It is today. Trust me, I’m on the thread of someone who’s a hell of a lot more dangerous than some coyote trafficking migrants. I’m passing all my information into the system, and if the folks in Utah want to charge him with conspiracy to commit murder for the death of the sheriff, or accomplice after the fact, let ’em. However this sorts out, nobody’s going to care that this isn’t the way you do things.”
A man in a CBP uniform knocked on the door, saying, “We got a hit.”
Jose waved him into the office and he laid a tablet on the desk. I looked at it, seeing a date, time, and crossing point nomenclature, followed by a name:
TAREK NAVARRO.
I stared at it, half afraid it would disappear, thinking,Got you.
Chapter 24
The Ghost felt the aircraft wheels touch down and strained to look over the shoulder of the man in the window seat, finding it too dark to make anything out beyond the runway lights. He saw everyone else bring out their cell phones and realized he would have to finally turn on the one he’d been given.
It was well past midnight, but the final leg of his flight to Puerto Iguazú was only a couple of hours from Buenos Aires. Unlike him, most of the passengers were awake and alert. After more than eighteen hours of traveling, all the Ghost wanted was a bed. Even so, the closer the plane traveled to its designated gate, the more the Ghost felt the adrenaline rise. The constant fight-or-flight response every time he traversed an airport was not helping his exhaustion.
He knew that Mexico could really care less about him leaving the country—only checking that he had a passport so he wouldn’t be turned around—but Argentina was a different story. They would want to know why a single man was entering the country.
Upon landing in Buenos Aires hours earlier, he’d answered the immigration officials’ questions, but then remained silent, watching the official run the passport through a scanner. He felt the sweat grow on his back, the time seeming to drag, and then the man had looked up and handed the passport back. He’d prepared to leave the station when the man told him to take a step back and look at a camera on a stalk.
That accomplished, he waited expectantly, hoping he would be let intothe country. The man stated he needed to place both index fingers on a biometric reader, causing yet another burst of adrenaline.
The world had changed remarkably since he’d been taken prisoner by the Americans, with new technology prevalent at every step of his journey, and he’d prayed that the fingerprint reader was just like the photo—namely, that it would simply tie him to his passport and not be leveraged for research into any databases.
The only one he had to fear was a set of prints obtained by Lebanese intelligence years ago, when he’d been captured in the demilitarized zone next to Israel. He’d never been charged with anything, and had been let go, and while he was sure they’d kept his fingerprints for the future, he was also positive Lebanon hadn’t kept pace with the technology he’d seen on his flight. They wouldn’t be digitized.
Then he’d remembered the fingerprint he’d given at the border crossing. It was most definitely digitized into a data set, but he had no idea how accessible it was. While that database, too, would be tied to the name on his passport, and ostensibly wouldn’t prove he was traveling with an alias, he was sure it would raise questions as to why he’d walked across the border in America to fly out of Mexico to visit relatives.
All of this had flashed through his mind while he placed both index fingers on the reader. It beeped, he’d looked up, and the man waved him through. He’d exhaled and walked into the airport looking for domestic departures, headed to Puerto Iguazú.
