“I don’t have a car.”
“You don’t need one. You’ll walk into town.”
“And what happens if the mister or missus happens to be awake and says, where’re you going, coffee’s on?”
“You say thanks but no thanks, you need to clear your head to start your writing day. You’re a writer-make something up. Tell ’em you like to take walks. It’s not even two miles. Shouldn’t take you more than half an hour. Any longer than that, you’re in lousy shape and you really do need the exercise.”
42
Dr. Mendoza was perplexed.
He had stanched the flow of blood but hadn’t yet discovered the cause of the bleeding.
Eliminating the banker had been an urgent necessity, of course. If the man had spilled, the consequences would have been immense. Truly catastrophic for the cartel.
But his employers had bigger worries. The question was how the Drug Enforcement Administration had even learned of the banker’s existence. Obviously, someone on the inside had tipped them off.
An informant. A “confidential source,” as the DEA called a snitch.
But who?
Surely, it was someone close to Thomas Galvin, the cartel’s US-based investor. Someone in his office, perhaps. Or on his personal staff. Someone who had access to his home.
Unfortunately, the cartel had reacted to the leak with customary crudeness. They’d thought they had identified the culprit and sent their gavilleros armed with knives and machetes.
But they’d guessed wrong.
Well, Dr. Mendoza knew where to find out. Maybe the leak was in Boston, maybe not. But the identity of the source would without question be in Washington, DC. At DEA headquarters.
Like all government bureaucracies, the DEA kept records, great masses of paper, with a manic compulsion. Even on their most closely held sources they kept notes, papers, documents. Naturally, these files were sealed and locked away. But files always needed to be updated and indexed and accessed. Such was the nature of a bureaucracy, its lifeblood. And that work was always done, without fail, by low-level file clerks.
And here was the DEA’s weakness. The human factor, always.
Low-level file clerks were extraordinarily easy to turn.
He needed to fly to Washington, DC.
He could barely remember a time when he wasn’t in the employ of the Sinaloa cartel. He had been barely thirteen on that sun-scorched afternoon when the big black Lincoln pulled into the gas station/bodega where his mother worked as a cashier. The heat shimmered up from the asphalt. He ran to the pump and took the driver’s order. The man spoke in Spanish. In that part of San Diego, everyone spoke Spanish.
“Okay, kid,” the driver said, handing him a twenty, “a pack of Winstons, two packs of Marlboro unfiltered, couple cans of Pepsi, and today’s paper.”
“Do you have a quarter?” Armando Mendoza asked.
“I just gave you a twenty, kid.”
“Yes, but it’s not going to be enough.”
The driver looked skeptical. “How the hell do you know that?”
Mendoza had shrugged. How to explain simple arithmetic? “Well, it’s sixteen ninety for the gas, the three packs of cigarettes is one eighty-nine, and with the Pepsi and the newspaper, that’s twenty dollars and twenty-four cents. So, I mean, this is close, but…”
“You some kind of math genius?”
“I just added it up.”
“In your head?”
He nodded. He was showing off, of course.
The driver said to a man next to him in the front seat, “You see this?” Then he stuck his elbow out of the window and leaned closer to the teenager. He removed his mirrored sunglasses. “How much is 239 plus 868 plus 102?”
“That’s too easy.”
“How much, huh? You can’t do it, can you?”
“One thousand two hundred and nine.”
“Hold on, hold on.” The driver turned to the other man. “Your watch has a calculator on it, right? Okay. Kid, what’s 7566 plus 8069? Quick, now.”
Mendoza smiled. He paused for a few seconds. “Fifteen thousand six hundred thirty-five.”
“That right, Carlos?”
“Nope,” said the other man.
“Nice try, kid,” the driver said. “You almost had us there for a while.”
“Hold on, hold on,” the other man said. “Fifteen six three five. He’s right.”
“That’s what I said,” Armando protested.
“Jesus, kid.”
Later, his mother was furious when she heard he’d gotten into the backseat of the Lincoln. Just a few months earlier, a kid in New York City had gone missing, and his face appeared on milk cartons. She’d told him this story as if to inoculate him from the possibility of anything so terrible happening to her only child.
But all they’d done was to take him to meet their jefe, to show off his math skills. El jefe, the great Héctor Luis Palma Salazar. El Güero as he was called: the Blond One. El Güero was impressed and made him an offer. They would rescue him from the barrio. They’d even send him to college. They’d train him as an accountant, and then he’d work for the cartel.
But even at the age of thirteen, Armando Mendoza knew he wanted to be a doctor. A surgeon: That was his true desire. Not an accountant.
El Güero didn’t argue. There was need for medical talent as well. He was farsighted, a brilliant organizer who had built the Sinaloa cartel into the most powerful drug-trafficking organization in history. El Güero Palma needed someone utterly reliable to enforce discipline, ask questions and get answers, conduct “interviews,” as Mendoza began calling them, whatever it took. And administer justice when it had to be done: with a scalpel and not an AK-47.
Dr. Mendoza was young-too young-but his time would come. The cartel would pay for medical school in Guadalajara and support him during his surgical residency. In return, he would belong to the cartel. He would provide them with surgical services as needed. Later, after he became a surgeon, he asked them to underwrite the clinic in Culiacán. If he was going to work for the cartel, much of the work unpleasant, he wanted to do good works, too.
His work for the cartel, his nonsurgical work-his special work, as he thought of it-this gave him no pleasure. He was not one of those miscreants who took sadistic pleasure in such things. He simply believed that it was better that a job be done well than poorly, and in his hands, it was always done well.
It was also a fact that he had saved many more lives, through his work at the clinic and at the private hospital in Culiacán, than he had taken. He had alleviated at least as much pain as he had caused.
Dr. Mendoza felt the need to remind himself of this, since very soon, he was quite sure, he would be inflicting a great deal of pain.
43
At six o’clock the next morning, Danny’s iPhone alarm went off. The bedroom was dark and a bit overheated, and for a moment Danny, woozy, nearly gave in to the temptation to go back to sleep.
Until he remembered.
Lucy mumbled, “Why are you getting up?”
“To do some work,” Danny said.
“What time is it?”
“Six. In Boston, it’s eight o’clock.”
She murmured, “We’re not in Boston,” and rolled over.
No one else was up, which was a relief. Before the grown-ups had retired for the night, Galvin had announced that they weren’t crack-of-dawn ski types and everyone should feel free to sleep in. But Danny was prepared in case Tom or Celina were up-he knew the girls wouldn’t be-and offered him coffee and wondered why in the world he was headed out so early. He’d say he was mentally outlining the next chapter of his book. Fresh air always helped him think clearly. Who’d question that? Writers were an enigma to most people anyway.