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Happily for him, the marina’s quiet atmosphere, combined with how the water carried the voices, allowed him to overhear snatches of conversation. In this way, he determined that el jefe’sname was Marks. Turning for a moment, he noted that the vehicle Marks had arrived in was a white Chevy Cruze. He jumped off the boat, then went at an unhurried pace back up the ramp and into the lot, where he jotted down the Cruze’s license plate number. Back on the boat, he returned his attention to Marks himself, his mind already plotting his next several moves.
It had been his experience that meeting with the chief of your enemies was preferable to working your way up the plantain tree. But meeting with federales, especially on their own turf, was a tricky business, one, Don Tulio knew, that needed to be thought out in considerable detail. He also knew that he would get one shot at confronting jefeMarks, so he was obliged to make the best of it. The danger of such a maneuver did not disturb him; he lived with danger every day of his life, had done so from the time he was ten years old and already raging through the streets of Acapulco. He had loved the sea, even before he became a cliff diver, showing off for Gringo money. He jumped from the highest cliff, dove the deepest, stayed down the longest. The churning water was his father and his mother, rocking him into a form of peace he could find nowhere else.
He became king of the divers, taking a cut from all their wi
He got out just ahead of the cops, fleeing north, losing himself in the immense urban sprawl of Mexico City. But he never forgot how the Gringo had ruined his life, for he loved the ocean waters, desperately missed his old life. Years passed and a new life began to weave around him. Anarchism first. When he was older, he took out his rage at the institutional corruption with bouts of extreme violence against anyone who held a steady job. Eventually, he got smart and joined a drug cartel, working his way up the power grid by any and all means, which impressed his superiors up until the moment he directed his followers to cut their heads off with machetes.
From that bloody moment on he had been jefe, consolidating his power with the other cartel heads. He was uncomfortable in society. He had no expertise navigating the capital’s deep and treacherous political waters, so he had forged an alliance with Maceo Encarnación, which had served them both well.
The Aztec made himself busy all over again while he leaned his ear to the prevailing wind and discovered that Popa was dead. JefeMarks had killed him, after which he had inadvertently found the key. The fucking key, Don Tulio thought with a savagery that shook him to his core. He has the fucking key.But then, his mind cooling a single degree, he dredged up this hopeful thought: He has the fucking key, but that doesn’t mean he has the thirty million.Which was followed by a second hopeful thought: If thefederales have the money, why are they searching the boat so frantically?
Fuming, the Aztec finished coiling a rope for the seventeenth time. Noting that the federaleswere breaking up, he went down into the cabin, waiting there patiently while he counted the number of rivets in the deck, perched uncomfortably on a narrow seat. Shadows passed as the federalesleft the Recursiveand went back up the dock to the parking lot. He listened for the car engines starting up. When, like popping corn, they ceased, he knew it was time.
Emerging from the cabin, he looked at the Recursive. It appeared deserted, but he resisted the urge to board it. Even though the clock that now measured his life was ticking mercilessly away, he knew it would be foolish to risk everything by going over there in daylight. Better by far to show patience, to wait for night to fall. He returned to the boat, lay down on the deck, and fell instantly into a deep and untroubled sleep.
Midnight,” Constanza said. “Ma
“Are you tired?” Rebeka asked.
Bourne shook his head.
She walked in, went past him, and stood by the window, arms wrapped around herself, staring out at the i
“Jason, do you ever think about death?” When he said nothing, she went on. “I think about it all the time.” She shivered. “Or maybe it’s just this place. Mexico City seems steeped in death. It gives me the creeps.”
She turned to him. “What if we don’t survive tomorrow?”
“We will.”
“But what if we don’t?”
He shrugged.
“Then we die in darkness,” she said, answering her own question. She stirred, then said, “Put your arms around me.” When he did, holding her tight, she said, “Why don’t we feel the way other people feel, deep down, not just on the surface, like water glancing off water? What is the matter with us?”
“We can do what we do,” Bourne said softly, “only because we are what we are.” He looked down at her. “There’s no turning back for us.
There’s only one exit from the life we live, and none of us who are good at what we do want to take it.”
“Do we love what we do so much?”
He was silent. The answer was evident.
He held her that way until, with a discreet knock on the partially open door, Ma
His name is unimportant,” Ma
“Isn’t that a little over the top?” Rebeka said from the plush backseat of the armored Hummer.
Ma
Flashing lights up ahead revealed a semicircle of cop cars, blazing headlights illuminating six cops using truncheons to beat down on a dozen teenagers armed with switchblades and broken beer bottles.
“Just another night in Mexico City,” Ma
They traveled on, through the Zona Rosa, the Historic Center, seemingly across the entire broad expanse of a city that sprawled, octopus-like, across the mile-high plain toward the great looming volcano, Popocatépetl, brooding like an ancient Aztec god.
They witnessed fires, street gangs stalking one another, they heard raucous Gringo techno and native rancheramusic spilling out of nightclubs, vengeful brawls, the occasional gunshot. They were passed by roaring, souped-up cars driven by drunken kids, with cumbiaor rap blasting from custom speakers, on and on, a nightmare scenario without end.
But at last they reached Villa Gustavo a Madero, and Ma
“Of course,” Rebeka said to relieve the almost unbearable tension, “where else would el Enterradorhang out but in a cemetery.”
However, it wasn’t to one of the crypts that Ma