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Marquez had jotted the codes on a page in his logbook and the DEA was trying to unravel their meaning. He doubted Holsing came up with them on his own and Sheryl backed that up, saying the DEA believed they were part of a Salazar Cartel code. They’d seen something similar on another case. He parked in front of Holsing’s house, walked up and looked through a window near the door. Nothing looked any different. The DEA would keep an eye on the house and collect Holsing’s mail for him while he was away being a fugitive, but no one was doing anything about the newspaper delivery. Marquez stepped over yellowing newspapers as he walked back out the driveway.
In the Bay Area gray fog sucked in by the valley heat darkened the sky as he drove across Marin County. He took a call from his stepdaughter, Maria, after he was on Mount Tamalpais and climbing toward the house.
‘Dad, when are you getting home?’
‘I’m almost home. What’s up?’
‘Mom says you might lose your job. How could that happen if you weren’t even there?’
‘I was Brad’s supervisor.’
‘But you weren’t even there.’
‘I’m responsible for my team wherever they are. That’s the deal.’
‘You can tell me to shut up, but how can that be fair?’
Brad’s death was about chain of command and he tried to explain that, but wasn’t sure he got through. Then Maria revealed that she called for another reason, as well.
‘I broke up with a guy I’ve been seeing.’
‘That can’t be easy.’
‘It’s not.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘Last week, and I’d like to talk with you, but not on the phone.’
Maria shared a house with three roommates in the Noe Valley in San Francisco. She worked part time for a web designer and part time for a guerilla web marketer. She was bright, quick, and restless, twenty-three and trying to figure out what to do with her life. She was an inch taller than her mother and with dark hair and a body made lean by cycling. She was currently anti-car and very worried about global warming. She’d also had something of a political awakening and asserted her opinions with the confidence of a TV preacher.
That night Katherine asked, ‘Did Maria call you?’
‘She did.’
‘I’m glad she’s breaking up with him. I didn’t like him at all.’
Later that night Katherine woke him by kissing him. He was never going to be exactly what she hoped for in a marriage. He loved the warden work, the SOU too much. He needed the feeling he was making a difference more than he needed money, and Katherine would never say it but she was more than ready for his undercover career to end. But sometimes you forgive a person for being who they are, as opposed to what you want them to be. He and Katherine had been separated once and close to it a second time, before they found a way through. He woke to her kisses on his face and chest and belly, and drew her close, and she whispered with her face pressed against his, ‘They’ll never have anyone ever again as good as you.’
THIRTY
‘ Kerry Anderson is going to call you,’ Sheryl said. ‘I talked to him this morning.’
Marquez was with Sheryl at a coffee place in Sausalito that he liked. Wardens worked from home and he came down here sometimes in the afternoons with a file, mostly in the winter when they tended to have fewer operations running. Everything lit up again in early March when the stripers and sturgeon started jumping on the Sacramento River and the bear came out of hibernation and deer herds congregated around the new grass. Most of this morning he had been on the phone with his team. Most of that conversation was about Brad, but he also gave them assignments.
‘OK, why is he calling?’
‘That’s the weird part, stranger even than Anderson. He says he has recent information on a phone intercept in Mexico where Stoval was talking about you. Maybe you know this, maybe you don’t, but Anderson’s role changed after 9/11. He does more analysis and shares more and that goes out to several agencies. He straddles several of the agencies. Anything they think is terrorism related they share and Anderson is pretty good at cooking that up. As you know, he’ll talk to anybody about Stoval. He’d talk to you if he was sitting next to you on a bus. I’ve never met anybody so obsessed with one person. Can you imagine what it would be like to be married to Anderson?’
‘He’s not married.’
‘Talking to him you’d think the only analysis he works on is Stoval.’
‘Where are you going with this?’
‘You are so patient, John. You’ve never changed. Where I’m going is Anderson called me yesterday fishing for anything I know about this Stoval task force that Ted Desault is heading. Talk about a blast from the past. Ted Desault – there’s a name I hoped I’d never hear again.’
‘Desault wants to meet with me. He wants to make me an offer. He called me just before Brad got killed.’
‘No kidding?’
Marquez nodded. They were sitting outside in wicker chairs in the coffeehouse garden less than a hundred yards from the bay. There were gulls, boats, tourists, and a chill wind this afternoon. He thought about Desault’s call and why he still hadn’t called Desault back. Now it hit them both at the same time and Sheryl said it aloud.
‘Stoval knows an offer is going to be made to you. That’s it, isn’t it? Is that scary, or what? He’s hooked into Desault’s task force. What kind of offer did Desault make you?’
‘I haven’t heard it yet.’
Marquez looked at a gull wheeling out over the water and Sheryl talked quietly about Stoval and the regeneration of the Salazar Cartel.
‘He’s still there. He still bankrolls short term loans for drug smugglers and we think he’s more involved in the new Salazar operation. And he doesn’t use the same contract killers to make sure he gets paid back. He does what the cartels do, he uses the Zetas.’
‘What’s anybody’s guess about his net worth now?’
‘Anderson says one point seven billion.’
‘He’s done well.’
‘Yeah, a lot better than you and me.’
‘What are you talking about? You’ve had a great career.’
‘You know what, John, the Group Five days were the best. When it was just our squad and we were working the Salazars and nobody else, that was great. Remember how close we all were? I hit a real low point after you left and after I moved back to California.’
‘When you married Phelps.’
‘Yeah, that two and a half years of marriage was the absolute rock bottom of the ocean.’
Marquez rarely thought about Pete Phelps, the ATF officer who’d been in Baja when they were there. He no longer felt any animosity toward Phelps, which was saying something.
‘I never told you I caught him in bed with my neighbor,’ Sheryl said. ‘I almost shot him, and I still think the only reason I didn’t is that it would have been one more mess of his to clean up.’ She sighed. ‘I have something else to confess. It’s why I drove over here. It’s why I didn’t want to talk on the phone. Stoval mentioning your name isn’t a surprise to the Feds, or at least this is what Anderson told me and should tell you. They know there’s a leak and they’re playing a cat and mouse game with it.’
‘I’m not following.’
‘OK, well, it’s possible Desault doesn’t know that Stoval mentioned your name in a phone intercept. Anderson knows because he’s lead analyst. He told me because he knows I’ll tell you, but it’s possible no one on the Stoval task force knows because the Bureau is frantic to find the leak. They have the same problem we had back in the Group Five days and I don’t know exactly what Anderson is going to tell you, but you shouldn’t go anywhere near the FBI task force. Stoval hasn’t forgotten that you went after him all those years ago. There’s probably nothing he’d like more than you coming after him again. These many years later and he’s keying off on your name. Maybe I’m getting older and less brave, but of all of them over all the years, Stoval scares me the most.’