He stood up, grabbed his coat, and, with one stab downward, hit enter. Then he crossed the room, went out the door, took the elevator to the lobby, and walked out, on his way back to his life with Tom Brick.
In the smoky distance, sirens wailed.
By the sound of them, vehicles were racing toward the Basilica de Guadelupe. The Mass was finished. Someone had found the body of el Enterrador.
“I don’t know where Maceo Encarnación and Nicodemo were going,” Anunciata said. “But I know someone who might.”
“Tell me,” Bourne said. He kept a sharp eye on the street, on the lookout for police cars.
“I’ll take you there.”
“No.” Bourne looked at her. “Your involvement is at an end.” He produced the wallet he had taken from Rebeka’s body. “It’s time for you to leave.” The last of Rebeka would go toward helping someone escape into a new life. He knew she would have liked that.
He opened the wallet, showing Anunciata the contents. “There’s money here, more than enough to set you up somewhere far away from Mexico. And a passport.” He paged through it. “You see my friend’s photo. You can pass for her. You’re more or less the same height and weight. Find a good salon, get your hair cut and dyed to match hers. A little makeup from a professional. That’s all you need.”
“Mexico is my home.”
“It will also be your death. Leave. Now. After today, it will be too late.”
Anunciata, holding the keys to her new life in the palms of her hands, looked up at him. Her eyes were swollen with tears. “Why are you doing this?”
“You deserve a chance at a new life,” he said.
“I don’t know whether I have the strength—”
“It’s what your mother wanted for you.”
The tears welled, falling. The sirens kept up a wail that could have come from her.
“There’s something...”
Bourne waited, then he engaged her eyes. “Anunciata?”
“Nothing.” She looked up. “It’s nothing.” She smiled. “Thank you.”
“Now,” Bourne said, folding her fingers over the wallet, “tell me who I need to see.”
Salazar Flores was an aviation mechanic. He worked mainly on private planes, most notably Maceo Encarnación’s Bombardier Global 5000. Bourne found him on the job in the maintenance hangar at the private airfield Encarnación used to house the Bombardier, exactly where Anunciata said he’d be at this time of the morning.
Flores was a short, sharp-eyed man in his middle years. His jowly cheeks were smeared with grease and his spatulate hands were permanently dyed by the fluids he used every day. He looked up sideways when Bourne approached him, then he stood and, wiping his hands on a greasy rag he pulled out of a back pocket of his overalls, faced the newcomer.
“How can I help you?” he said.
“I’m buying a Gulfstream SPX,” Bourne said, “and I’m thinking of housing it here.”
“You got the wrong guy.” Flores indicated the office building across the runway from the hangar where they stood. “You need to talk to Castillo. He’s the boss.”
“I’m more interested in talking with you,” Bourne said. “You’ll be taking care of my plane.”
Flores eyed Bourne appraisingly. “How’d you hear about me?”
“Anunciata.”
“Really?”
Bourne nodded.
“How’s her mom?”
“Maria-Elena died yesterday.”
Bourne seemed to have passed some kind of test. Flores nodded. “An inexplicable tragedy.”
Bourne had no intention of telling Flores just how explicable Maria-Elena’s death was. “Did you know her well?”
Flores regarded him for a moment. “I need a smoke.”
He led Bourne out of the clanging hangar where three other mechanics were at work, out onto the airfield. Keeping to the side of the runway, he shook out a cigarette, offered it to Bourne, then stuck it into his mouth and lit up.
He stared up at the high clouds as if looking for a sign. “You’re a Gringo, so I suppose you know Anunciata better.” He let smoke drift out between his lips. “Maria-Elena had a difficult life. Anunciata didn’t like to talk about it.” He shrugged bull shoulders. “Maybe she didn’t know. Maria-Elena was very protective of her daughter.”
“She wasn’t the only one,” Bourne said, thinking of the conversation he had overheard in the rectory of the Basilica de Guadelupe between Anunciata and el Enterrador. “Maceo Encarnación kept her like a hothouse flower.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that.” Flores looked around as if at any moment one of Maceo Encarnación’s men was going to pop out of the shadows like a ghoul.
Bourne shrugged. “I assumed you knew the two of them well.”
Flores took a last suck on his cigarette, dropped it, shredding it beneath the heel of his boot. “I have to get back to work.”
“Are we getting into dangerous territory?”
Flores shot him a look. “Whatever it is you want, I can’t help you.”
“This can help you, though.” Bourne spread the five hundred-dollar bills between them.
“¡Madre de Dios!” Flores puffed out his cheeks, exhaled heartily through pursed lips. He looked up at Bourne. “What is it you want?”
“Only one thing,” Bourne said. “Maceo Encarnación took off this morning. Where was he headed?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
Bourne stuffed the bills into the pocket of his overalls. “I’m sure your wife and kids could use some new clothes.”
Flores looked around again, still jumpy, though no one was in earshot and those who could be seen weren’t paying them the slightest attention. “I could lose my job...or my head. Then where would my wife and kids be?”
Bourne added another five hundred. “A couple of iPads will make you a hero.”
Flores, visibly sweating, ran a hand through his hair. Bourne could see the tug of war between greed and fear being played out on his face. Still Flores hesitated. It was time to play his last card.
“It was Anunciata who suggested I talk to you about Encarnación’s destination.”
At this, Flores’s eyes opened wide. “She was—”
“She wants you to tell me.” A jet turned onto the head of the runway, its engines building to a roar. Bourne took a step closer. “It’s important, Señor Flores. It involves Maria-Elena’s death.”
Flores’s face registered shock. “What d’you mean?”
“I can’t tell you,” Bourne said, “and you don’t want to know.”
Flores licked his lips, took one last glance around the airfield, and nodded. As the jet shot down the runway and, in a veil of noise and fumes, lifted off, he leaned forward and whispered a word in Bourne’s ear.
Martha Christiana took the call from Maceo Encarnación with an icy serenity.
In an hour his plane would be landing, he would send one of his people to fetch her, and that would be the end. She would be in the center of the vortex, unable to extricate herself. The moment she stepped onto his plane, she would be in jail—she could feel it. She possessed too much incriminating information on him. One way or the other, he would never allow her to leave him.
From Don Fernando’s living room windows, Martha Christiana stared longingly at the ethereal spiderwork of Notre Dame, its floodlit stone cool as marble. In the depths of night, she was wide awake. Don Fernando wasn’t. He slept on one side of the large bed in the master bedroom, the curtains closed against the lights and noise of the city.
Below her, on the western tip of the Île Saint-Louis, rose the sounds of young laughter, a guitar being strummed, drunken voices raised briefly in a raucous chorus of some beer-hall sing-along. Then more laughter, a shout. A fistfight broke out, a beer bottle smashed.
Martha did not look down. She wanted no part of the ugliness below; she had enough ugliness in her own life. Instead, she allowed her eyes to trace the ancient grace of the cathedral’s flying buttresses, curved like angels’ harps. She was tired, but she wasn’t sleepy, a semipermanent state in her profession.