T
he regular security at Galvin’s house had seemed elaborate enough, with the eight-foot-high wrought-iron fence and the electric swing gate that opened only once you identified yourself.
But Galvin, at Danny’s urging, had hired a private security company that provided trained ex-soldiers and ex-policemen to corporations and wealthy individuals. And now the property had the look of a military base. The two uniformed guards who stopped Danny at the gate didn’t look like the run-of-the-mill, rent-a-cop variety. They looked fit and professional and had walkie-talkies and were armed. A third appeared to be patrolling the perimeter on foot.
One of them came over to Danny’s car. Danny rolled down his window at the guard’s stern behest and handed over his driver’s license.
“I’m a friend. Daniel Goodman.”
“Yes, sir, we’re expecting you,” he said, consulting a clipboard. The guy stared at Danny’s license, handed it back, and nodded to his partner. The gate slowly came open.
“What is this?” Abby said. “What’s with those guys?”
Danny didn’t answer. He couldn’t tell her the truth, but he didn’t want to outright lie. He drove up the long tree-lined road that wound through the woods to the house.
“Are you going to
tell
me what’s going on?”
He pulled over and put the car in park, the engine running. “Boogie, listen. One of Mr. Galvin’s clients has been threatening him and his family.”
She squinted, frowned. “So . . . what does that have to do with me?”
“The thing is, they’re probably targeting close friends, too. Anyway, that’s what Tom’s security company tells him, and we don’t want to take any chances.”
Her mouth came open. “But what—what about Jenna?”
“She’s being picked up separately.”
“Holy crap!” she said. “I don’t believe this. You mean we can’t leave the house?”
“Just for a couple of days. Until this blows over.”
They pulled up to the house.
• • •
Celina answered the door, looking beautiful as ever, in jeans and a beige silk top, but her radiant smile was gone. She wore no makeup and looked a little haggard. She gave a perfunctory smile; she wasn’t hostile so much as remote, guarded. Her life had been rocked by the carnage at Aspen and its aftermath here at home. Everything had changed, and was about to change even more drastically, and she was frightened for her family.
“Abby, would you like to go to Jenna’s room? She’s on her way back right now.” The little rat dogs skittered around them, swarming them, wheezing and rasping, their nails clicking like tiny tap shoes.
“Torito! Loco! Enough!” she said.
She placed both hands on Abby’s shoulders. “Abby,
querida
, you and Jenna will have a nice time this weekend. Maybe you and Jenna can help make dinner tonight?”
Abby blinked and nodded. “Okay, sure,” she said, unenthusiastic, giving a quickly disappearing smile.
“There’s nothing to be scared about,” Celina said.
But Abby didn’t look convinced.
• • •
A few minutes later, Tom Galvin and Jenna came through the front door, followed by a stocky black man in a navy sweatshirt, his gun holstered on the left side of his belt. In his ear was the coiled wire of a security earpiece. He stood in the doorway.
Galvin looked ill. His shoulders seemed stooped. He was pale, with beads of sweat on his forehead. “We’re all set, Dennis,” Galvin told the guard, who nodded and left, pulling the door closed behind him.
“Mamá!” Jenna gasped, her eyes wide. “Will someone tell me what is going on here? Are we, like, prisoners here? Is anyone going to
explain
?”
“Celina,” Galvin said flatly. “Have a talk with the girls. Danny, you and I need to have our own talk.”
“What about College Night?” Jenna said.
“Huh?” her father said.
“Tonight at school,” Abby said. “College Night. Everyone has to be there.”
“Sorry,” said Galvin. “Change in plans. College Night’s been canceled. You girls can stay here and have a party.”
“We don’t have a
choice
,” Jenna told her father. “It’s not, like,
optional
. We have to go.”
Danny shook his head. Celina said, “It’s not good time.”
“Dad, every single girl in the class is going to be there,” Abby said. “There’s going to be admissions reps from Yale there, and Princeton and Brown, and the college counselors will be telling everyone what we have to do, and answering questions. It’s not a choice. I have to be there. We both do.”
“Not tonight,” Danny said. “Sorry.”
“You think I
want
to go to College Night?” Jenna said to her parents. “Abby really wants to go, okay? I mean, it’s not like I’m even going to get
into
college. Not unless you buy them a gym.”
Galvin looked stung. “Don’t say that, honey. The right college will be lucky to get you.”
“Lucky to get
you
, you mean. Anyway, you can’t force us to stay here. We’re not prisoners.”
“Actually, I have bad news for you. I
can
force you to stay here. Last I looked, I’m your father.”
“And I wish to hell you weren’t!” Jenna shouted. “You’re a goddamned Nazi, you know that?” The sharp edge of her banked fury was blunted only by her tears.
Galvin was quiet for several seconds. Then he shook his head, as if all the fight had gone out of him. “Don’t talk that way,” he said softly.
“I hate you!” Jenna said. “You’re ruining my life.”
“Your father loves you,
chica
!” Celina said. “Don’t say like this!”
“No!” Jenna shouted, and she stormed upstairs. A moment later, Abby followed Jenna.
Galvin muttered something to Celina in Spanish. Then he said, “Right now, Danny and I need to have a talk of our own.”
The two men headed toward Galvin’s office.
“I’ve got to show you something,” Galvin said.
“It’s gonna have to wait,” Danny said.
Galvin looked at him.
“I think you haven’t been honest with me,” Danny said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.” At the door to Galvin’s study, he folded his arms.
Galvin looked at him sharply. “About . . . what?”
That was when Danny knew for certain he was right. “About how you’re working with the DEA.”
U
ntil he learned the truth about Slocum and Yeager—that they were grifters—Danny had believed he was the leak, the confidential source of damaging information about Galvin that had so alarmed the Sinaloa cartel.
But he’d assumed wrong. Since they were frauds, someone else had to be the leak.
And that someone was Galvin himself.
It defied the odds that Galvin could have served as Sinaloa’s chief money man for so long without the DEA finding out and trapping him.
Galvin had as much as said so.
I’ve been at this a long time. Long enough for the DEA to dig down deep into what I’ve been doing. And trap me. Force me to flip. That doesn’t seem crazy, does it?
Now Galvin looked at Danny for a long time. He blinked a few minutes. “You’re a smart son of a bitch, you know that?” he said at last. “I’m going to put all my cards on the table. The simple, ugly truth is, the feds got onto me about a dozen years ago. I should have expected it—the whole arrangement was too good to last. An agent with the DEA showed up at my office and started asking me questions. I guess they had a team of accountants poring over Mexican cartel cash flow out of the HSBC bank. And he had a theory that pointed right to me.”
“Which you denied.”
“Of
course
I denied it,” he said with a shrug. “Until I figured out that someone high up the chain of command in the cartel must have turned. They had me. I had a choice of cooperating or fighting it. But this one DEA guy—name of Wallace Touhy—was too smart. Or his sources were too good. He had me.”
“You didn’t . . . try to fight it?”
Galvin shook his head. “What was the point? You can’t prove a negative. I couldn’t prove to them I wasn’t cooperating with the DEA—they’d
assume
I was cooperating. Or that eventually I’d break down and give them up. Then they’d have no choice but to kill me. They’d write me off as just another cowardly gringo who’d sell them out.”
“You became a confidential source for the DEA.”
“They gave me a choice. Twenty, thirty years behind bars—or help them out. Tip them off. Hand them the occasional Sinaloan, as long as I could do it without the cartel suspecting me. That was the trick—you never know who inside the DEA might be secretly working for the cartels. So Touhy agreed to run me off the books. A silo operation. The only way to make sure the cartel didn’t find out. He locked up my file in a cabinet somewhere—I mean, there’s always documentation. Has to be. He assigned me a number, and that was about it for paperwork. I must have given up five or six high-ranking Sinaloans over the years.”
“And how do you think the Sinaloans found out?”
He shrugged. “Ever seen that World War Two poster of a guy drowning, says, ‘Someone Talked’?”
Danny nodded.
“I guess I’m just lucky I got away with it as long as I did.”
“This DEA guy can’t help you now?”
Galvin scoffed. “The DEA? What are they going to do, put my whole family in witness protection? I mean, short of giving me plastic surgery and stashing me in North Dakota, there’s nothing the government can do, once the cartel has it in for you.
“For days now, I’ve been trying to reach out to Touhy. They gave me a number; I call it, he answers twenty-four/seven. Always. Except not this time. I’ve been calling him. No answer.”
Danny felt a fresh panic rising. “And?”
“And I just found out why. I got a source in the state police. Touhy’s dead. Murdered, brutal. Like, tortured to death. And if I don’t act now, I’m next.”
“You say this like you’re certain.”
“I am. And I know who they’re sending.”
“I
need to show you a picture,” Galvin said, nodding toward his open laptop.
The image that filled the screen was of a man in a dark overcoat. Danny leaned in closer. The image was slightly blurred, like a still from a surveillance video. The man was entirely bald and had rimless glasses and appeared to be sitting in a vehicle, his head turned toward the camera. Looking directly
at
the camera, in fact.
“Who’s that?” Danny asked.
Galvin turned away from the screen, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. His face shone with sweat. It occurred to Danny that he looked as if he’d recently been sick to his stomach. He wiped a hand over his face.
“
El
ángel de la muerte.
The angel of death, they call him. He’s the guy they send.”
“Who? Send to do what?”
“The cartel. Sinaloa. His name is Dr. Mendoza. That’s all I know—Dr. Mendoza, no first name.” He paused, took a deep breath. “He specializes in . . . coercive interrogation.”
“You mean like ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’? Torture?”
Galvin shrugged. “Whatever you want to call it. I’m next on his list.”
“But how do you know he’s coming?”
“This picture was taken about an hour and a half ago, from a security camera on my fence. The guy was just sitting in a car across the road, watching and waiting. Like he was biding his time.”
“So you think your guy—Touhy?—was tortured and gave up your name, that it?”
Galvin nodded. “And maybe we’re safe as long as we stay on the property. But I can’t stay here indefinitely. I’ve got to vanish. At some point soon I need to leave.”
“And then what? He’s gonna . . .”
“You know the videos on the Internet of those guys with chain saws cutting off people’s heads and all that? The ones you see in your nightmares?”
Danny exhaled audibly, nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak. “Oh, yeah.”
“Well, this is the guy who gives
those guys
nightmares.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Danny said, and for a long time he was silent. Then: “What does he want from you?”
“Account numbers, access codes, everything.”
“Was he behind what happened in Aspen?”
“No, I don’t think so. That was a Zeta signature. And that’s what I still can’t figure out.”
“What can’t you figure out?”
“Blood in the water brings out the sharks. I get that. My guys—Mendoza—they’re Sinaloa. But I don’t know how the Zetas got involved. Or why they’re coming after me.”
He turned and looked at Danny curiously. Something in his expression seemed almost accusatory. As if he knew Danny was holding something back.
And Danny could no longer keep Galvin in the dark about the ex-DEA agents. No more. Keeping that secret from Galvin had become unbearable.
“Now I need to tell you something,” Danny began.
T
he air in Galvin’s study was thick with cigar smoke. It hung in the air like clouds, like suspended jet contrails. A cigar smoldered in a big glass ashtray on the desk in front of him. The husk of another one sat blackened in the ash.
Galvin had listened to Danny’s story in silence, barely reacting.
“I knew you were ensnared in something,” he said when Danny had finished. “I’ve known it since that squash game.”
Danny winced. “I don’t even know what I can say to you. How I apologize.”
“You think I’m gonna judge you? After what I’ve done? Come on, man.”
Danny fell silent for a moment. “Do you . . . you think they’re working for Zeta?”
He shrugged. “Could be. I’d say it’s likely. They’re apparently ex-DEA contractors, and we know at least one of them was in Aspen. I told you, that obscenity in Aspen—that looked and smelled like the work of the Los Zetas cartel.”
“And that ticket to Nuevo Laredo—isn’t that where Los Zetas is based?”
“Right. Tell you something else. This is exactly how Zeta operates. They’re—like hermit crabs.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“Know how the Zetas got their start? They were all members of Mexico’s special forces, who were hired by the Gulf cartel to do security, enforcement. But after a while they decided, why be just the hired muscle—when they could make as much money as their bosses? So they broke off and started their own cartel. Kinda like the way hermit crabs find empty seashells and move in.”
“So in this case they’re trying to take over . . . what, the whole Sinaloa cartel?”
“They want what I built for the cartel. The entire financial structure. Account numbers and passwords and the keys to the kingdom. Cut to the head of the line. They colonize. They take over. Forget hermit crabs—they’re like cancer.”
“They want your master password by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, or . . .” He shook his head, didn’t want to let his mind even go there. “I mean, is there even such a thing? Do you have one master password?”
“How would they know that?” Galvin said with a curious half smile.
“Do you?”
He nodded. “Look, I’m no computer guy, but I’m smart enough to hire smart people, and they set me up with the most sophisticated password-management system you can get. All the most sensitive information—the entire list of account numbers and passwords and contact names and numbers—is encrypted and stored on a cloud-based service and blah blah blah. If you want to unlock that directory, you need to enter a passphrase, not a password. It’s actually a lyric from a Lynyrd Skynyrd song.”
“I’ll bet I know which one.” “Sweet Home Alabama” was a fairly safe guess.
“I’ll bet you do.”
“But it’s not going to do me any good. It’s not like I’m going to give them the passphrase and they’re going to say thanks and shake hands and leave me alone.”
Galvin grimaced. “I’m sorry you got into this.”
Danny looked at him for a long time. What did Galvin have to be sorry about? He didn’t get him into this. Danny did, himself. “There’s pretty much nothing I can give them that will guarantee my safety or the safety of my family,” he said softly. A gloomy desperation was settling in. “The best I can do is buy a little time.”
“I wish I had the answer,” Galvin said, “but I don’t.”
“And what about you? You disappear with however many billion dollars of their money, they’ll look for you forever.”
“Of course. Which is why I’m only taking the profit.”
“The profit?”
“The cartel owns real estate and shopping malls and fast-food franchises and a whole range of companies. All owned by a holding company. Plus a lot of cash.”
“You’re taking their cash?”
“Uh-uh. I always knew this arrangement had an expiration date. I knew the time would come when I’d have to disappear. I’ve been squirrelling away nuts for years now.”
“Meaning what? You’ve been ripping the cartel off?”
“Not at all. It’s money I’ve earned. A couple of hundred million dollars in an array of offshore accounts. Management fee.”
“So you’re going to sail to, what, the Caribbean and disappear under the name of that one hundred percent genuine US passport you bought?”
Galvin nodded once.
“And the couple of hundred million bucks—that’s in the same name?”
“No. All the offshore accounts are in a different name. You have to keep the passport name and the account name completely separate. I’ve done the research.”
“And what happens when US law enforcement starts pulling at the loose threads? They’re getting good at it, aren’t they? A lot of these Caribbean countries are starting to cooperate with the US.”
“Some are more than others, but that’s beside the point. My money’s in something the accountants call a walking trust. Meaning that the moment law enforcement opens an inquiry into one of my accounts, the trust is automatically dissolved. The funds are wired out immediately to another account in another country. Believe me, they’re not going to find me.”
“There’s no guarantees. Even if you do something elaborate like faking your death, they won’t be convinced. They won’t believe it.”
“You’re right. But there’s nothing I can do about that.”
“Maybe not. Unless there is.”
“This is not for you to worry about. You just need to take care of your family.”
“Well, you’re protecting my daughter. That means a lot to me.”
Galvin bit his lower lip. “You and Lucy are—over, right?” It sounded like he’d been wanting to ask about her for a while.
Danny nodded.
“You did it to protect her.”
Danny just blinked a few times. His eyes were moist. “She walked out.”
“But you didn’t stop her.”
Danny nodded again.
“You did the right thing.”
“It wasn’t up to me.”
“But you let her go. You’re letting her walk away because you love her. I get it.”
Danny winced, nodded. “What about you?”
“What?”
“Walking away. You’re just going to, what? Get on your boat and sail off the grid?”
“Pretty much.”
“What about your family?”
“My being gone is their best protection. You think it doesn’t rip my heart out?”
“Of course it does. But it’s not enough. It’s only half an exit strategy.”
“I’ve got my walking papers and my walking trust. What else is there?”
“I’m a biographer. Trust me on this. You need a narrative. A story.”
Galvin peered at him, shook his head, not comprehending.
“The answer’s been staring me in the face this whole time,” Danny said.