He nimbly steers back through Boca Larga and out into the Gulf, then opens the throttles, rousing the Hemis to a roar as the boat accelerates with its prow rising, the men laughing as they hold tight against the rearward lean.
They don’t switch on the running lights or cut back to cruising speed until they’re a mile out and turn north for home.
The Ram lumbers through the underbrush along the twisting shell track glowing pale bright in the headlights and holding the truck to a speed of around fifteen. The driver, Jorge, turns the air conditioner up another notch, grousing that he can walk faster than he can drive on this so-called road. Alberto’s riding shotgun. Neto and Felipe are in the rear seat.
They are discussing whorehouses, a subject initiated by Neto’s enthusiastic account of a recent visit to a new brothel in Mexico City called El Palacio de Los Ángeles. He claims it has the prettiest girls of any house he’s ever been to and it fully guarantees that they’re free of disease.
He and Jorge both favor the simplicity of brothels. You pick out a girl, you pay a fixed price for exactly what you want, you get it, and when you’re done you say, So long, darling, maybe I’ll see you again. Lots of variety and none of the problems of a regular girlfriend.
Alberto admits to the practicalities of clean whorehouses, but he much prefers sex that includes some affection.
Affection? Jorge says. You talking about love? Hey, man, every time I go in a whorehouse I fall in love. Then it’s over and I leave and I’m not in love no more. Works out great.
Not for me, Alberto says. It’s not as satisfying when you pay for it. If you want variety, do what I do and get a lot of girlfriends.
Any way you get it you pay for it, Neto says. You don’t spend money on your girlfriends? And every girlfriend sooner or later becomes as much of a nag as a wife. Who wants a lot of that?
He’s convinced me, Felipe says. Soon as I get home I’m kicking my girl’s ass out the door.
What girl? Alberto says. You haven’t had a girlfriend since Bettina kicked you out.
Yeah, well . . . if I did have a one, out she’d go.
Let’s have some music, Jorge says.
He switches on the CD player and ranchero music resounds from the speakers. The others all groan and Felipe says, No more of that hick shit, man. We had to listen to it all the way up here.
The driver picks the music, Jorge says, that’s the rule. Chief said so.
Well, I’m making a new rule, Alberto says. We take turns picking the music and it’s my turn.
He fingers through a row of CDs in the console and picks one. He ejects the ranchero disc from the player and inserts the selected CD, and the speakers begin booming the heavy-metal tempo of a band called Asesino.
Oh, yes! says Felipe. That’s more like it!
As Jorge grumbles about the unfairness of changing the music rule in the middle of a run, they enter a hairpin turn that forces him to cut their speed even more, the headlights dragging across palm trunks and high brush as the truck crawls through the bend. Then they’re out of the turn and facing a straight stretch, and the headlights expose a ponderous dark vehicle standing ten yards ahead and blocking the trail. It faces in the other direction, its lights off, its interior hidden within black glass.
Jorge stomps on the brakes and the truck crunches to a halt.
“What the hell?” Alberto says, and starts to reach for the volume knob on the player just as the dark brush on both sides of the mysterious vehicle detonates into a crackling, flaring barrage of automatic gunfire.
The men shriek and convulse as bullets punch through the Ram’s windshield and transform it into a thickening web of starbursts. The windows come apart in shards. The tires blow and the truck lurches and slumps and the engine quits. The music cuts off. The headlights go last—the ambushers having no further need of them to delineate their target.
Fifteen seconds after it commenced, the shooting stops. All screaming has ceased. The only light is the cab’s dashboard glow. The only sounds are a harsh hissing under the hood, the clacking of weapons being reloaded with full magazines, the snapping of cocking handles.
The vague form of a man holding a firearm at waist level with both hands appears from the gloom on the forward right side of the truck and cautiously approaches it. When he’s abreast of the cab he can see the men inside in the dim dash light, motionless, slumped in unnatural attitudes. A faint scent of blood exudes from the shattered windows and threads into the mix of gunfire fumes and marsh odors. He fires a luminous burst through the front window, jarring the two bodies, the near one folding atop the console, the driver crumpling lower against the door. He then sidles over and looses a burst into the men in the back seat. Then lowers the weapon and says, “Luz.”
Lights come aglow on both sides of the trail and three men emerge from the scrub, two from the left, one from the right, each of them wearing a utility light strapped to his forehead like a miner and each man armed with an M4A1 carbine. They curse the mosquitoes that in this part of the marsh are so fierce even the strongest repellent is of small effect.
In the light of the head lanterns, the man at the truck is revealed as young and clean-shaven, with a pale wormlike scar that angles vertically down the right side of his mouth. He presses a button on his wristwatch to illuminate its face and show the time. Chico, he says, the vehicle, move.
Got it, chief, Chico says, and jogs up the trail to the huge black Suburban. The chief calls another crewman to the rear of the Ram and has him shine his light on the padlock securing the topper gate to the tailgate. He stands to the side of the lock to avoid possible damage to the cargo, puts the muzzle of his carbine to the juncture of lock case and shackle, and blasts the lock apart. He raises the topper gate and the crewman shines his light on the crates inside. Because of the attack’s diagonal lines of fire into the cab, the shipment shows no sign of having been struck.
Good, says the chief.
Driving in reverse, Chico brings the Suburban to within a few feet of the Ram, and the other men store their weapons in it. The chief orders them not to take anything from the dead men, not their guns, phones, money, anything. They have just removed the first crate from the truck bed when they hear a pulsing buzz from the Ram cab. They recognize it as an incoming phone call on what has to be a satellite unit, as no cell tower is in range.
They know the truck stopped, one of them says.
Don’t piss your pants, the chief says. By the time they get here we’ll be long gone.
Still, they step up their tempo, panting with effort, sopping with sweat, faces itching and bloated with mosquito bites. In another few minutes they shove the last crate into the Suburban, shut and lock the rear doors, scramble into the vehicle, and drive away.
In a large room on the highest floor of a towering Mexico City building whose blazing neon sign reads Zuma Electrónicas, S.A., a young technician called a screener sits before a row of computers, intermittently shifting his gaze between the monitors and the sports magazine in his lap. It is dull duty but pays well. Like the majority of employees of Zuma Electrónicas, the screener has a university degree in computer engineering. And like everyone else who works on the top floor of the building, he has a top security clearance and knows that the company has commercial ties—mostly clandestine—to numerous other business organizations and that