There was a long pause, another sip, another sigh. Finally, Chandler grunted. “Odd. I can’t say who brought it up. I guess it was just an impression I got.”

Even though fear was shifting the world beneath her, Grace made certain her voice was level. “Well, since you haven’t talked to me about Lane in months, and no one else in D.C. really knows my son, it must have been Ted who gave you the wrong idea.”

“Well, now that you mention it…”

“When did you talk to Ted?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“Did you see him?” Grace knew her tone was too sharp, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

“He was in D.C. for a few hours, some kind of hush-hush meeting. He just stopped by the Hill for a few minutes to say hello.”

She let out a long, silent breath. Someone had seen Ted in the last two weeks. Progress, of a sort.

“Did he say where he was going?” she asked.

“No.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“No. You sound upset.”

“I haven’t seen or heard from Ted for more than three weeks,” she said. “I was hoping to contact him through you.”

“Is something wrong? I mean, between the two of you? I thought the divorce was all very civilized.”

“It was. It is. I just hoped that…” Ted would step up and be the father Lane needs. That Ted would at least call Lane once a week or even every two weeks.

Another truck roared by, belching diesel into the unusually sultry air.

“It doesn’t matter,” Grace said. “But if you hear from Ted, please ask him to contact me. I’m tired of being his answering service. A lot of people get angry at me because they can’t get through to him.”

The senator coughed. “I hear you. Take care, Grace. We need women like you on the appeals court.”

“Men, too,” she retorted, but she laughed. “Good-bye, Chad. And thanks.”

She rushed back onto the toll road, leaving a rooster tail of dirt in her wake and wondering if drugs were what Calderon had on his mind.

3

TIJUANA, MEXICO

AUGUST

SATURDAY, 12:12 P.M.


JOE FAROE CAME OUT the front door of Tijuana Tuck amp; Roll carrying what looked like a two-foot-long section of vaguely curved abstract art carved from oak. The shop that had made the oak piece had been in the same location for more than forty years. It was a hangover from the days of gringo surfers and hot-rodders crossing the border for cheap custom car work. When angora dice and hand-stitched leather seats stopped being cool, the shop had chosen a different business model.

It made the best smuggler’s traps to be had in a city whose economy was based on smuggling.

The output of Tijuana Tuck amp; Roll was the kind of open secret Mexico thrived on. The shop was surrounded by a stout chain-link fence topped with lazy, deadly loops of razor wire, the kind that would cut a man to rags.

Joe Faroe knew about wire like that, just like he knew about the auto upholstery shop’s real business.

Been there.

Done that.

Burned the T-shirt.

Faroe glanced across the street. The man was still there, still leaning in the shadow of a doorway. The watcher looked away when Faroe stared at him, but he didn’t move from his post.

A cop, Faroe decided.

The dude’s leather jacket and comfortable belly gave him away. For some cops, life was good.

Okay, is he a Mexican cop or an American working south of the line, trying to figure out the latest smuggling wrinkle?

Is he looking for an arrest or a shakedown?

Faroe closed the chain-link gate behind him and stared at the cop whose leather jacket was almost as expensive as Faroe’s.

The dude pretended he didn’t exist.

Faroe kept staring.

Finally the cop looked over casually and nodded. He was an old hand. He knew he’d been burned.

“Have a nice day,” Faroe called across the street.

The cop shrugged and turned away to light a cigarette.

Faroe strolled along the buckled, treacherous sidewalk toward La Revo. He’d parked in Chula Vista and walked across La Linea-the border. Now he needed a cab back to the U.S. port of entry. There were always cabs next to the zebra-striped burro on the corner of La Revo and Calle Cinco.

The cop stopped smoking long enough to talk into a cell phone or a radio. Faroe couldn’t tell which and didn’t care. For the first time in decades he had a squeaky-clean conscience.

Around him the air smelled of broken septic lines and tacos with claws in them. The sidewalks were dirty and cracked, cluttered with hunched indio beggars, sidewalk souvenir sellers, and a timeless collection of hustlers, thieves, and ordinary people just trying to get by. They peddled leather boxes, brightly painted wooden toys, and T-shirts celebrating the joys of everything from drugs to anal sex. The shops were ramshackle and poorly stocked. The bars advertised lap dancers. Next door, phony pharmacists in white coats peddled cut-rate Viagra and knockoff cancer drugs.

The tourist district of Avenida Constitucion tried to be respectable, but it reeked of shadowy bargains, furtive pleasures, and easy vice. Cheap smokes, cheap liquor, cheap sex; everything the bluenoses had squeezed out of San Diego had migrated a few miles south to Tijuana.

Faroe walked the block that had once held the infamous Blue Fox. Sidewalk bar barkers hailed him every few steps.

“Hey, mister, you want some pussy? How about a little fun? Preeeety girls, right here, come in.”

A thin man with a thinner black mustache had incorporated sound effects into his sales routine, pinching one side of his face between thumb and forefinger and jerking the flesh of his cheek juicily to suggest sex.

Faroe had heard all the come-ons since he was fifteen. Once he’d smiled at the grimy tricks. Then he’d become indifferent. Now he was disgusted.

He didn’t know if it was an improvement.

He flagged a passing yellow cab and climbed in the backseat with his parcel. Instantly the driver made eye contact in his rearview mirror and gave him a broad, practiced grin.

“I can find anything for you, senor. Girls, mebbe? I know where the clean ones are.”

“La Linea,” Faroe said. “Go back through the Zona Rio.”

The driver looked at Faroe’s eyes, shut up, and turned north.

In three minutes the taxi left the hustling, squalid streets of Old Town behind. Now Faroe looked out on the broad boulevards of Tijuana’s international district. When he’d first come to Tijuana, this river district had been an open sewer over a marshy land. It had been equal opportunity sewage-some stayed south of the border and some emptied with the Tia Juana River into the ocean at Imperial Beach, U.S. of A.

The river still carried sewage, but it was underground now. On top were streets like the Paseo de los Heroes, whose high-end international shopping rivaled that of any city on earth.

Stores. Discos. Nightclubs. Restaurants.

Banks.

Lots and lots of banks.

Their business towers were modest compared to those in San Diego, but by the one- and two-story scale of the rest of Tijuana, the banks were giant, glistening, new. A mecca for money.

Just shows what thirty billion dollars a year in outside income can do for a city, Faroe thought. Too bad the billions came mostly from ghetto addicts and barrio hypes north of the line.

But that wasn’t his problem anymore. Steele and St. Kilda Consulting be damned, he was through with the crisscross, double-cross, black-is-white and white-is-black world he’d lived in all his adult life.

Let some other fool risk his butt to save a world that doesn’t want to be saved, fuck you very much.

Yet Faroe still felt sorry for the poor citizens in TJ who weren’t in on the money game that was going on all around them. They scrambled for a lousy living while most everyone else fattened on the sugar teat of smuggling.

Too bad, how sad, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I’ve retired my broken lance and put poor old Rosinante out to pasture.

And if Steele doesn’t understand, he can just shove it where the sun don’t shine.

The cabbie dropped Faroe at the edge of the neutral zone called the port of entry. He walked along another street crammed with pharmacies and souvenir stands. A block south of the physical frontier, shops gave way to storefront travel agencies offering passage to Los Angeles and the Central Valley, Wenatchee and Burlington and Spokane, fifteen hundred miles away. Kansas, Chicago, New York, Colorado, the cotton fields of the South; any and all destinations welcoming cheap workers were represented by hawkers competing for warm bodies to fill their quotas.

Faroe passed the long, snaky line of visa seekers outside the administrative offices of the Border Protection Agency. Like someone who has done it many times before, he pushed through the swinging doors that led to the auditorium-sized processing center.

Last stop before American soil.

A customs inspector wearing a blue shirt and a sidearm spotted Faroe’s parcel and pointed to the X-ray scanner.

Faroe put the box on the conveyor belt and waited. A second inspector stared at the scanner screen, examining the contents of the parcels and bags on the belt.

Automatically Faroe stepped through the metal detector and wondered with professional interest what would happen. He might not be in the business anymore but was curious to know how his secret traveling safe stacked up against pros.