Dusk fell as they travelled across the city. Anna sat at the back of the SUV and said nothing. No-one spoke. There was a sense of anticipation among the three agents. Determination. Callan had disassembled his handgun and was cleaning the mechanism with a bottle of oil and a small wire brush, as ritualistic as a junkie with his works. Hammond was listening to music again, her eyes closed and her head occasionally dipping in time with the beat. Pope was driving, his eyes cold and resolute, fixed on the road ahead. Their equipment was laid out on the floor in the back of the van: MP-5 SD3 suppressed machine-guns equipped with holographic sights and infrared lasers; a large M249 Squad Automatic Weapon; H&K machinepistols; a Mossberg 500 shotgun; three 9mm M9 Beretta pistols; M67 grenades and a Milkor Mk14 Launcher; M84 flashbangs; night-vision goggles. The agents were each wearing jeans, t-shirts and desert boots with khaki load carrying systems strapped on over the top. Each gilet was equipped with pouches for ammunition, hooks and eyelets for grenades and flashbangs, and each was reinforced with Kevlar plates.

The second SUV was directly behind them. They had visited the restaurant and found it closed down, boarding fixed across the front door. They had asked around at the other businesses nearby and discovered that there had been a second shooting, two days after the first. The owner and the woman who ran the front of house had both been shot dead. No clues as to who did it. It was them who they needed to talk to. Since they couldn’t, that trail had run cold.

But it looked like they didn’t need that trail, after all.

Anna was nervous. She would have preferred to stay behind but Pope had insisted that she come. If the operation proceeded as he hoped they would not delay in getting out of the city and back across the border again. There would be no opportunity to detour and pick her up. Pope had explained what she would have to do calmly and without inflection: stay in the van, don’t get out of the van, leave it all to us.

And Pope needed her help, too.

He parked a hundred yards away from the gated entrance to the compound. Anna saw a guard shack and two men, both of whom were armed with rifles.

“Alright, Anna,” Pope said. “There’s the house. See it?”

“I’m not blind.”

“Do your thing.”

She opened her laptop and connected with the internet. Her slender fingers fluttered across the keyboard as she navigated to the website for the Comision Federal de Electricidad and, after correctly guessing the URL for the firm’s intranet, forced her way inside.

“I can’t be surgical about this,” she said. “It’ll be the whole block.”

“Doesn’t matter. Can you do it?”

“Just say when.”

“Ready?” Pope asked the others.

Hammond said, “Check.”

“Check,” said Callan.

“Alright then. Here we go.”

They quickly smeared camouflage paint across their faces. Pope put the van into gear again and slowly pulled forwards. When they were twenty feet away from the gatepost the guards came to attention, one holding up his hand for them to stop. The van had tinted windows and the two of them were unable to see inside. The men made no effort to hide the automatic rifles they were carrying. Pope pulled a little to the left, opening up an angle between the driver’s side of the van and the gatepost. One of the man spat out a mouthful of tobacco juice and stepped into the road. Hammond brought her MP-5 up above the line of the window, aimed quickly, and put three rounds into each guard. Anna was shocked: the gun was quiet, the suppressor so efficient that all you could really hear was the bolt racking back. The men fell, both of them dead before they hit the floor.

Anna’s heart caught. She had never seen a man shot before.

Suddenly, it all seemed brutally, dangerously real.

Pope calmly put the van into gear again and edged forwards through the gate.

Anna compared what she could see in the gloom with the map she had examined earlier. It was a crescent-shaped street that curved around a central garden. Mansions were set back behind tall fences. It was nothing like the rest of the city; it was as if all the money had fled here, running from the squalor and danger outside and cowering behind the gates. One of the gardens was lit up more brightly than the others: strings of colourful lights had been hung from the branches of pecan and oak trees and strobes flashed. The sound of loud Norteño music was audible. Pope pulled over outside the driveway of the mansion. They pulled down full-face respirators and added night vision goggles.

They collected their weapons.

The time on the dashboard display said 21:59.

“Now, Anna.”

She hit return.

Her logic bomb deployed.

The time clicked to 22.00 and all the lights went out.

The streetlights.

The lights in the mansion, the colourful lights in the grounds.

The music stopped.

“Go, go, go,” Pope said.

52

Plato and Gomez ended up on their usual jetty, looking out onto the sluggish Rio Bravo. The brown-green waters reached the city as a pathetic reminder of what it must have been, once, before the factories and industrial farmers choked it upstream for their own needs. They were beneath the span of the bridge, sitting on the bonnet of Plato’s Dodge. The headlights were on, casting out enough light so that they could read the graffiti on the pillars. Several of the concrete stilts had been decorated with paintings of the pyramids at Teotihuacán. He could see the fence and the border control on the other side. The low black hills beyond El Paso. America looked pleasant, like it always did. The day was ending with the usual thickening soup of smog, muffling the quickly dying light.

Sanchez pulled another two cans of Negro Modelo from the wire mesh.

Plato took a long draught of his beer. He sighed. His heart wasn’t in the banter like he hoped it would be.

“What’s on your mind, man?” Sanchez asked. “You’ve been quiet all night.”

“Been coming here for years, haven’t we?”

“At least ten.”

“But not for much longer. All done and finished soon.”

“What? You saying you won’t still come down?”

“Think Emelia will let me?”

“You wait. She’ll want you out of the house. You’ll drive her crazy.”

“Maybe.” Plato tossed his empty can into the flow. It moved beneath him, slow and dark. Sanchez handed him another.

“What am I doing?”

“What?”

Plato looked at the can, felt it cold in his palm. He popped the top and took a long sip. “I can’t stop thinking about that girl.”

“From the restaurant?”

“And the Englishman. Going after her like that. Going after the cartels, Sanchez, on his own, going right at them. Makes me ashamed to think about it. That’s what we’re supposed to do — the police — but we don’t, do we? We just stand by and let them get on with their murdering and raping and their drugs. We swore the same oath. Doesn’t it make you ashamed?”

He looked away. “I try not to think about it.”

“Not me. All the time. I can’t help it. All that bravery or stupidity, whatever you want to call it, how do I reward him? — by sending him on his way to a death sentence and not doing anything to help him. And then three of his colleagues turn up and I won’t even take them to where he is. Didn’t even try and help them. I just tell them where to find him. They go there, that’ll be another three deaths that keep me up at night. All I can think about, all day, is what am I doing? I’ve just been trying to keep my head down. Get my pension and get out.”

“You’ve done your years.”

“Not yet. I’ve still got one more day.”

“So keep that in mind. One more day then all you need to worry about is your family and that stupid boat.”