Stolen Prey

She hesitated, looking for the right word.
    “Cojones,”
Lucas said.
    She smiled then and said, “Ah, your Hemingway. But yes, exactly. So…” She put out her hand, which was small and soft, and Lucas took it and said, “If I don’t see you again, I thank you for coming and trying to help.”
    T HAT CONVERSATION , Lucas thought as they parted, should just about cover the state of Minnesota’s daily minimum requirements for hypocrisy.
    From his office, he watched her walk across the parking lot to her car, and when she was rolling, he called Shaffer and said, “She’s gone.”
    “You think she bit?”
    “She was so straight that I’m beginning to worry that I could be wrong,” Lucas said.
    “She’s been spying on the guy she’s been working next to for, what, four, five years, and then she killed him? If she couldn’t look you in the eye and sell you a lie, she would have been dead a long time ago,” Shaffer said.
    “Yeah, you’re right. I know goddamn well she’s the one,” Lucas said.
    “I’m calling my crew back. Get Del, Jenkins, and Shrake over here, and let’s put it together. She might be moving fast.”
    “Wish we’d had time to box her,” Lucas said.
    “Just no time,” Shaffer said. “Besides, she’ll be coming back.”
    M ARTÍNEZ
was
moving fast. After leaving the BCA headquarters on Maryland Avenue, she took Maryland west to a CVS pharmacyand got out in the parking lot with her sat phone. A few minutes later, she was speaking to the Big Voice, telling him what had happened at the meeting, reading off the address for Martha White. The Big Voice got it on his computer screen, asked her where she was, and said, “You are perhaps two kilometers away. A few minutes.”
    “I will find it on my iPad.”
    “I will alert Uno and Tres. Meet with them, go in there, see if the gold is there, and get out. Do you have your alternate ID?”
    “Yes.”
    “I will have a car rental for you in … Bloomington, Minnesota,” the Big Voice said. “This one is near the airport, on the same freeway, but farther west than the airport. I will send a map for your iPad.”
    “Thank you.”
    “I will have another car and a new ID for you in Kansas City, Missouri. If you drink enough coffee, you can be on the border tomorrow afternoon.”
    “Yes.”
    “You’re not worried about entering the house?”
    “Not if we do it fast enough,” Martínez said. “They are deploying at the airport in two hours…. We have to be out in two hours, or sooner.”
    “Then go.”
    B UT SHE
was
worried. Her conscious mind had bought the charade at the BCA, but her unconscious, her intuition, nagged at her. She paid attention to that, the nagging feeling. Rational analysisargued that she had not given herself away, but there was something about the situation….
    And she still hadn’t made up her mind about the gold. Keep it, or turn it over to the boss? If she kept it, she’d have to do something about Uno and Tres. She decided that she’d worry about that when the gold was in her car.
    The phone rang a minute later, and it was Uno.
    “Where do we meet?”
    “There is a school here. In the parking lot. I will tell you the directions….”
    They were fifteen minutes away.
    She resented all fifteen of them.

17
    M artínez’s problem, which she’d recognized before she ever set foot in the U.S., was that none of her subordinates, Uno, Dos, and Tres, were particularly bright; they were the Mexican equivalent of the hapless American shitkicker who discovers the power of the gun. Which was fine when somebody needed to be killed right now, or chopped to pieces. Not so fine when subtlety was needed.
    She waited for Uno and Tres in a Metro State University parking lot; when they arrived, they got out wearing jeans and black sport coats, and not-so-subtly armed with Mac-10s over their shoulders, nine-millimeter pistols tucked in their belts.
    “How will you carry them if we have to go on the street?” she asked of the Mac-10s.
    “Under a jacket,” Uno said.
    “It’s warm. It’s hot.”
    “So … if anybody asks, we shoot them.” Uno laughed to show that he was joking. Maybe.
    T HEY WERE in a hurry, but Martínez took five minutes to examine the target house, and the surrounding area, on a Google aerialphoto that she pulled up on her iPad. When she was satisfied that she had the general lay of the land, they left, taking her car. If they were ahead of the BCA, then the car wouldn’t matter. If it