been swept to the degree possible. To the right was a smaller room stacked with rusted tools and, incongruously, millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine.
“Are they down there?” Rapp said, pointing to a narrow hallway.
“Yeah. But I don’t know what you’re going to do with that information. I told you, we’ve been interrogating them nonstop since we got here, and tomorrow we have orders to get them and their product into the system. I don’t know where the hell you came from, and frankly I don’t care. But I guarantee you’ve never dealt with psychos like these. They’re the kind of people who throw bags of human heads into nightclubs. And they know exactly what’s going to happen to them if they say one word to us. So you’re wasting your time. And worse, you’re wasting mine.”
Rapp nodded and started down the hallway, pushing through a metal door at the back. The room on the other side was probably twenty feet square, furnished with a single chair and illuminated by sun filtering through holes in the roof.
The two men handcuffed to an overhead pipe were pretty much what he’d expected. Muscular, late twenties or early thirties, with tattoos visible through sweat-soaked shirts. Their shoes were missing and they had a few minor scrapes, probably from their capture and not their interrogation.
The younger of the two had hard eyes, but the older one had crazy eyes. He lunged pointlessly in Rapp’s direction, before being stopped by his handcuffs. The motion was violent enough to open a cut on his right wrist and the blood began sliding down his wet forearm.
“Fresh meat!” he shouted in heavily accented English. “Another DEA pussy? You got a woman at home? Would she like a real man? How about a daughter? You know I like them young. I show them a real good time before I slit their throats. We know who you are, little boy. We’re watching. We’re always watching.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Braman shouted, trying to take control of the situation.
“Your family’s first,” the man said, fixing on him. “You think we don’t know where they live?”
The DEA man couldn’t hide that he was a little unnerved by the man’s words. And, in truth, he had every right to be. The cartel’s use of drones, hackers, and highly paid informants made it pretty credible that they really did know where his family lived. To date they hadn’t acted much on that kind of information on the U.S. side of the border, but it was just a matter of time.
As the drug trafficker’s diatribe slipped into unintelligible Spanish, Rapp turned toward his compatriot. The younger man’s resigned expression suggested that he figured his future was pretty well laid out: Keep his mouth shut. Go to jail for a few years under the protection of cartel-sponsored gangs. Lie around, lift some weights, eat three squares a day, and finally get out and go back to work.
When he eventually got around to meeting Rapp’s eye, though, he seemed to recognize that his situation had changed. He wasn’t sure how yet, but he looked worried. Maybe this wouldn’t be as long a day as Rapp had expected.
“Let me go,” the crazy one said, switching back to English and refocusing on Rapp. “You could both just say I escaped. Then my friends won’t have to visit your families.”
Rapp thought about the offer for a moment and then retreated back through the door. Flores jumped to his feet when he entered the outer room, but Rapp went straight for the storage area. He had to climb over the coke and a few shovels, but he managed to retrieve a large bolt cutter that he’d noticed earlier.
When he returned to the interrogation room, Braman looked at him like he was nuts. “What kind of idiots is Washington sending me? If you’re too scared of this guy to be here, then go back home to the suburbs.”
The cartel man’s face broke into a smug smile when Rapp lifted the bolt cutters toward his handcuffs.
“Stop!” Braman said, reaching for his sidearm.
Rapp opened the cutters, but at the last second diverted them to the man’s wrist. They were likely too old and dull to cut through the steel of the cuffs, but they didn’t have any trouble taking off a hand.
The man screamed and dropped to his knees as Braman drew his pistol. The problem was that the DEA man wasn’t sure whom to point it at, and his hesitation gave Rapp time to