shirts.
“I’m worried, Ali.”
“About Hater?”
“I have tried to reach out to him, but nobody can find the bastard.”
“If he has gone to the Americans, they would already have been here and your sons killed—or worse. Trust me, there is no evidence linking your sons to the massacre. The fact that they are still breathing proves this.”
“You seem certain,” César said.
“I am, jefe . I trained your sons myself. I am certain they left no clues behind.”
César stared hard into Ali’s eyes, probing him for lies. He found none.
That was because Ali was supremely confident about Hater. He had ordered the Mara gangbanger crushed to death in a thirty-ton hydraulic press the day after the massacre. Hater’s tattooed remains were scooped into a sealed barrel and sunk to the gulf floor where the drum settled in the middle of an abandoned dumping ground for American military ordnance. The Mara had to be killed. Hater was the only link anyone had to the massacre—and Ali.
But the inability of either the Mexican or American government to find other hard evidence against the Castillos and launch an attack had come as a complete surprise to the Iranian. The boys really had covered their tracks.
Now Ali wondered if the feckless Americans would ever seek their revenge against the Mexicans. If evidence was the problem, he’d have to provide it. Fortunately, he’d planned for this contingency, too.
César laughed. “Yes, you trained them well, didn’t you?” He clapped Ali on the back, then turned the Iranian back toward the big sniper rifle. “So tell me, maestro, why can’t I hit the fucking target with that thing?”
“It takes patience, jefe . You just need to practice. Trust me,” Ali said, smiling.
—
Three hours later, the three Castillos and five premium escort girls were barricaded behind the gilded doors of the mansion’s Fiesta Room, a sordid collection of vibrating beds, leather sex swings, exotic animal skins, glittering disco balls, thundering audio, and a bank of digital projectors looping porn on every wall.
When he was certain they were all passed out from copious amounts of Cristal, meth, dope, and perversion, Ali slipped into his own privatequarters and locked the door behind him. He opened up his encrypted cell phone and dialed an untraceable number that bounced off of a series of satellites and cell towers, sending the signal halfway around the world and back again until someone on the other end of the line picked up.
“Yes, Commander?” a man asked in Farsi. The Western-trained computer specialist was speaking from Quds Force headquarters in Ramazan, Iran.
“The dog needs her bone,” Ali said.
“It will be done within the hour.”
Ali clicked off his phone. The technician he had spoken with was first-rate. By this time tomorrow, Myers should be howling with rage, and by the grace of Allah, tearing at Castillo’s throat with her sharpest teeth.
9
Arlington, Virginia
Within the last fifteen minutes, there had been an explosion in tweets and retweets on a string of highly related, red-flagged search topics: #elpaso, #cincodemayo, #massacre, #myers, #killers, #aztlan, and others.
What was going on?
Sergio Navarro was at his computer workstation inside the Intelligence Division of the DEA headquarters building. It was 4 a.m., he was the shift supervisor, and he was bone-tired.
The twenty-six-year-old intelligence analyst had helped form the new Social Media Task Force organized around RIOT, Raytheon’s new social-media data-mining software. Rapid Information Overlay Technology not only hoovered data on suspects using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, it also predicted their future behavior. Drug dealers were as attracted to social media as the rest of the world was, and their desire for more human interaction through inhuman computers enabled the DEA to harvest terabytes’ worth of vital intelligence information that they might not
“I’m worried, Ali.”
“About Hater?”
“I have tried to reach out to him, but nobody can find the bastard.”
“If he has gone to the Americans, they would already have been here and your sons killed—or worse. Trust me, there is no evidence linking your sons to the massacre. The fact that they are still breathing proves this.”
“You seem certain,” César said.
“I am, jefe . I trained your sons myself. I am certain they left no clues behind.”
César stared hard into Ali’s eyes, probing him for lies. He found none.
That was because Ali was supremely confident about Hater. He had ordered the Mara gangbanger crushed to death in a thirty-ton hydraulic press the day after the massacre. Hater’s tattooed remains were scooped into a sealed barrel and sunk to the gulf floor where the drum settled in the middle of an abandoned dumping ground for American military ordnance. The Mara had to be killed. Hater was the only link anyone had to the massacre—and Ali.
But the inability of either the Mexican or American government to find other hard evidence against the Castillos and launch an attack had come as a complete surprise to the Iranian. The boys really had covered their tracks.
Now Ali wondered if the feckless Americans would ever seek their revenge against the Mexicans. If evidence was the problem, he’d have to provide it. Fortunately, he’d planned for this contingency, too.
César laughed. “Yes, you trained them well, didn’t you?” He clapped Ali on the back, then turned the Iranian back toward the big sniper rifle. “So tell me, maestro, why can’t I hit the fucking target with that thing?”
“It takes patience, jefe . You just need to practice. Trust me,” Ali said, smiling.
—
Three hours later, the three Castillos and five premium escort girls were barricaded behind the gilded doors of the mansion’s Fiesta Room, a sordid collection of vibrating beds, leather sex swings, exotic animal skins, glittering disco balls, thundering audio, and a bank of digital projectors looping porn on every wall.
When he was certain they were all passed out from copious amounts of Cristal, meth, dope, and perversion, Ali slipped into his own privatequarters and locked the door behind him. He opened up his encrypted cell phone and dialed an untraceable number that bounced off of a series of satellites and cell towers, sending the signal halfway around the world and back again until someone on the other end of the line picked up.
“Yes, Commander?” a man asked in Farsi. The Western-trained computer specialist was speaking from Quds Force headquarters in Ramazan, Iran.
“The dog needs her bone,” Ali said.
“It will be done within the hour.”
Ali clicked off his phone. The technician he had spoken with was first-rate. By this time tomorrow, Myers should be howling with rage, and by the grace of Allah, tearing at Castillo’s throat with her sharpest teeth.
9
Arlington, Virginia
Within the last fifteen minutes, there had been an explosion in tweets and retweets on a string of highly related, red-flagged search topics: #elpaso, #cincodemayo, #massacre, #myers, #killers, #aztlan, and others.
What was going on?
Sergio Navarro was at his computer workstation inside the Intelligence Division of the DEA headquarters building. It was 4 a.m., he was the shift supervisor, and he was bone-tired.
The twenty-six-year-old intelligence analyst had helped form the new Social Media Task Force organized around RIOT, Raytheon’s new social-media data-mining software. Rapid Information Overlay Technology not only hoovered data on suspects using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, it also predicted their future behavior. Drug dealers were as attracted to social media as the rest of the world was, and their desire for more human interaction through inhuman computers enabled the DEA to harvest terabytes’ worth of vital intelligence information that they might not
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