The Fall Moon Read online

  She scowled at me and snapped. “I know, Stone! I can see that!”

  I grabbed her wrist and made her face me. “For Christ’s sake, Dehan! So they know we are here too!”

  Her face went pale in the early light. She stared at me a second, then looked down at the car that was driving off with Cesar and the other two. It wasn’t headed back to the ranch, it was headed to the road.

  “Shit!” She moved for the personnel carriers.

  I grabbed her and pulled her back, speaking savagely to her. “Think, Dehan! There will be men climbing the hill toward us now, from the woods. The car will be heading for us up the canyon path. We can’t take the personnel carrier. We’ll be ambushed on all sides…”

  “Then what…?”

  “We head into the hills and the canyons. We call the field office and report what happened. Find a hiding place and wait for them to come for us. But right now, we run!”

  She nodded, and then we were scrambling down into the canyon that lay at our backs, running, jumping, falling and sliding. Branches and twigs tore at our skin and our clothes. Rocks and stones stabbed into our hands as we fell and scrambled to our feet.

  Then we were at the bottom of the canyon, sprinting for the far side. The whine of engines carried on the dawn air. Now, instead of falling and tumbling, it was an agonizing, slow climb, slipping on the loose, dry earth, scrabbling over the loose stones, clawing at shrubs, taking three slow steps up, and sliding down two, pulling ourselves up with branches and bushes. All the while, the whine of climbing engines grew louder behind us. Then, as we were approaching the top, the tone of the engines changed, slowed and grew deeper. I rasped, “Lie flat! Don’t move!”

  The vehicles, whatever they were, had reached the path that climbed out of the canyon to where Brad had set our camp. Now we could hear the engines in low gear, grinding their way up that path. I whispered, “Crawl to the top. Stay under cover!”

  We were maybe seven or eight feet from the crest of the hill. Staying flat, we pulled ourselves, arm over arm, a foot at a time, through the tall, yellow grass, toward the cover of a couple of gnarled oaks. We wriggled the last couple of feet and lay behind the short, thick trunks, peering back toward the other side of the canyon. There was nothing to see but oaks, mesquite, yucca and tall yellow grass.

  I hissed, “We have to go!” Dehan was on her phone. I tugged at her. “Come on! We have seconds!”

  We began to half stumble, half run down the slope into the denser vegetation below in the ravine. Dehan spoke as she slipped and scrambled ahead of me, keeping her voice low.

  “This is Detective Carmen Dehan, badge number…” She slipped and fell. I pulled her up as she recited her number into the phone and we continued stumbling down, crouching now under the broad canopy of branches and leaves that lay in a tangled mesh across the bottom of the valley. Dehan was hissing, “I need to talk to the SAC about Agent Brad Tucker’s operation at… No, listen to me! I know Agent Tucker isn’t there! I was on operation with him!”

  She sat at the foot of a mesquite, squeezing her eyes tight and clenching her fist. I said, “We haven’t got time for this. We need to move…”

  She rasped, “Listen to me. Stop talking. Listen. I was on the operation with Agent Tucker… As an observer! Will you shut up and listen to me! I need to talk to the special agent in charge!”

  I took the phone from her hand and hung up. She glared into my eyes. I said, “If you don’t stop, we’ll be dead inside five minutes. Let’s go.”

  We followed the course of the bottom of the valley. Progress was slow and difficult. The undergrowth was impenetrable in some parts and we had to fight our way through a morass of twigs, branches and tangled weeds and grasses. At times the undergrowth was so dense we had to climb up the side of the ravine to get around it, taking it in turns to keep watch on the horizon for Cesar’s men. There was no question in my mind that they were following us, led by the Sicario; the only questions were, how close was he, and was he closing on us?

  After half an hour, we heard the first chopper. We followed the sound with our eyes, though we did not see it. We were in a kind of cave formed by a narrow gully, two large oaks, several mesquite and a cluster of desert ironwood trees. Dehan had stopped and was leaning her back against a large rock. Her breathing was shallow.

  “We are screwed six ways from Sunday, Stone. We’ve put some distance between ourselves and Cesar’s men, now we need to take a couple of minutes to think and make some kind of plan.”

  “Agreed.” I pulled out my phone and looked at the screen. “No signal.”

  She frowned and shook her head in rapid jerks. “How can they expect to get away with this? They just murdered eighteen federal agents! They will have the Bureau and the National Guard all over them before lunch!”

  I glanced up at the sky. “I only hear one chopper at the moment.”

  “Come on! The girl I spoke to wasn’t exactly a genius, but even she, once you had helpfully hung up for me, would have to go to her supervisor and report the call. They haven’t heard from Brad—the two choppers on stand by never heard from Brad. They have to put two and two together; they’re not just going to shrug and say, ‘Oh, well, I guess he’ll call!’ They have eighteen agents who just went AWOL! There must be alarm bells going off all over the Bureau.”

  “Dehan, keep your voice down and stop ranting. You’re right. But it is not that simple.”

  “Not? How is it complicated?”

  “Shut up. Please. Just for a bit. Our first priority is not getting disemboweled this morning. Agreed? So this is what we do. We go, predictable, predictable, unpredictable; predictable, unpredictable, predictable; unpredictable, predictable, predictable.”

  “We do what now?”

  “We follow the easy, predictable path, as we have been doing for the last half hour or so, to a particular point. In this case the end of this canyon. The closest town is Rio Rico. So we are going to head northwest toward it. That’s predictable, so that would be two predictable things we’ve done. So then we do something unpredictable.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like instead of turning west and north at the end of this canyon, we continue east into the next one instead, follow that for a while and then climb to the top to see if we can get a signal.”

  “So for every two predictable, logical decisions we make, we make one that is totally illogical, but in a random order.”

  “Yes.”

  “I like it. OK. Let’s keep going.”

  We set off and started picking our way through the dense undergrowth again. Above us, to the left, the top of the steep incline was gradually sloping down as we reached the end of the gully, where three canyons met. I pointed ahead. “Here they would expect us to turn either north or west. We keep going east.”

  “Got it. So explain to me why you think the combined force of the Bureau and the National Guard are not coming down in force on that ranch.”

  I was quiet for a bit, picking my way carefully over loose rocks and shrubs.

  “The first thing is that by the time they realize something is wrong, the bodies have either been incinerated at the ranch or flown back to Mexico. They had a lot of manpower there, and it would not have been that difficult to remove any trace of their presence.”

  She drew level with me and opened her mouth to object. I said, “Wait. The shipment of coke, or whatever it was, is already off the ranch and on its way, presumably, to New York. So there is no trace on the property itself of anything that brought the Feds there in the first place, or of their having been there.”

  “But there is a judge who saw the evidence and signed off on an order to raid the ranch. There is in existence an order to that effect and the evidence that gave rise to that order. There is also an SAC who ordered the raid and two personnel carriers sitting outside the ranch. And now, on the morning that order was executed, we have eighteen missing federal agents and two NYPD detectives.”

  She gave me a look
that said I must be crazy not to see that. I nodded.

  “Sure. That’s true. But it is also true that before anybody goes storming in after Brad Tucker, they will need a warrant, and they will be very unlikely to get one, because any judge asked to sign off on it will know that they are not going to find anything on the ranch. That chopper we heard was probably the feds looking for Brad. There is probably a drone up there looking too. But you know as well as I do, Dehan, before a single shot was fired, Cesar and Camacho had already briefed their lawyers. And before the day is out, those lawyers will bombard the state with complaints, injunctions and possibly even legal actions.”

  I looked at her, waiting for my meaning to register on her face. It didn’t take long. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “Because he already knew we were coming. They were waiting in the woods for the teams to take up their positions. So they slaughtered them and cleaned away the evidence and now the ranch is pristine.”

  “And that begs the question: did he know we were listening at the hotel, and plant this information? Or is there a leak at the field office? Did somebody tell him we were coming?”

  The bed of the intersection where the three canyons met was dense with undergrowth and trees. We crossed it with difficulty, but unseen, and when we had reached the far side, we began to climb the slope toward the top of the canyon, in the hope of getting a signal there. Halfway up, we came to a rocky outcrop where we could rest and hide. There we sat, gratefully, and checked our watches. It was half past nine, and we were both becoming hungry and thirsty.

  I stared out west, toward the ribbon of the Santa Cruz River and the road that followed its course. After a moment, I became aware that Dehan was staring at me and I turned to meet her gaze.

  “It makes no sense,” she said, “that Camacho would plant this information at the hotel and set this up. It doesn’t benefit him in any way.” She shook her head. “No, he and Cesar were alerted. Somebody told them we were coming.”

  I nodded. “I agree.”

  She held my eye a moment longer. “There was gunfire from the airfield, and grenades. There was none from the ranch or the road where Brad should have been. And Brad had all the information about the operation. He was the one man who had the authority to stop the choppers coming in, and to preempt a response after Camacho’s men had started their attack. He never gave the alert that the plane was approaching.”

  “A man who was at such pains to protect his team?”

  “A man who was so keen to keep us off it. I’m telling you, Stone, there was more than corpses on that plane back to Mexico.”

  I looked at my phone and saw I had a signal.

  EIGHTEEN

  There was no sign of Camacho’s men, or the Sicario, but a couple of miles south and west, there was a helicopter that seemed to be circling over the ranch.

  “Who did you talk to?”

  She shook her head, watching the chopper. “I don’t know, some dame.”

  I smiled. “Some dame?”

  “She kept telling me I wasn’t part of Agent Tucker’s team and she had no authority to talk to me about it.” She sighed. “You got a signal?” She pulled her phone and looked at the screen.

  I said, “You know what? Don’t call the field office.”

  She glanced at me.

  “We don’t know anything right now, do we? The fewer people we communicate with…”

  “What do you suggest?”

  I pointed west and slightly north. “We have Rio Rico about four or five miles over there. We take any of these canyons in front of us, it will lead us to the river. Then we follow the river for an hour and it will take us to the town. We call D.C. and tell him what happened.”

  She gave a couple of nods, like she was agreeing with only bits of what I was saying. “What makes you think D.C. isn’t our leak?”

  “Nothing. It could be anyone. But we give him a location, like the travel center on the I-19, intersection with Ruby Road…”

  “The Pilot Travel Center.”

  “Right, but we are not there when he arrives.”

  “What do you mean? Where are we?”

  “We tell him to park outside the fast food burger joint. That’s right by the river and there are lots of trees along there. We stay in the cover of the trees and we watch, see if he comes alone, if he comes with other feds or if he comes with Cesar’s men. Then we decide what to do and whom to contact.”

  She made a face. “Makes sense. What’s going to stop Cesar from killing us along the river?”

  I shook my head. “Remember, his plan was even more improvised than Brad’s. He had maybe twenty-four hours to set it up. When we ran, he missed his chance. He won’t keep searching. That’s what he brought his Sicario over for. The feds may not be storming the ranch, but they are taking a good, hard look at it, so he has to pull his men back. And the Sicario will not be wasting his time scouring almost two million square acres of the Coronado Forest to find us. He knows we have to surface sooner or later, and he knows roughly where. That’s where he’ll look for us.”

  She thought about that for a moment, looking down at her battered, dusty boots. “Where?”

  “The field office, D.C.’s house, the Bronx, and all along the route connecting those three.”

  “Nice.”

  “The sooner we get to the field office and get debriefed, the sooner we get the leak identified and plugged, and the sooner we can go on the offensive.”

  She sighed and stood. “That I like.”

  As it turned out, we covered the mile and a half to the river in a little under two hours. At first, the going was difficult and slow, struggling over loose rocks and through shrubs and woodland. But when we reached the far canyon, we found a narrow, beaten path and were able to follow that all the way to the Santa Cruz. From there it was easier.

  We picked up the South River Road and followed it at a brisk pace for three and a half miles. Just over an hour after that, we’d finally crossed the railroad and the river on the Ruby Road Bridge, and were resting our asses outside the Pilot Travel Center. I looked at my watch; it was closing on ten to one.

  “I’m starving. You want to grab a couple of burgers and some coffee while I phone D.C.?”

  She nodded and we pushed inside. I grabbed a table by the window, where I could keep an eye on the lot, while she went up to order at the counter. I found D.C.’s number and called. He answered after the first ring.

  “John, is that you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah, we’re OK.”

  “What about Dehan? Where are you? What the hell happened?”

  “She’s OK, too. I don’t want to talk too much on the phone, D.C. Can you come and get us?”

  “Where?”

  “We’re at Wendy’s Burgers, the Pilot Travel Center, just south of Rio Rico on the I-19.”

  “I know it.”

  “D.C.? Just for now, till we get back to the field office, keep this to yourself, OK?”

  He was quiet for a long moment, then said, “I hear you.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m at the Resident Agency in Tucson right now. It’s going to take me forty-five minutes to get to you. I’ll try and get there sooner.”

  “OK, park outside Wendy’s where we can see you.”

  “You got it.”

  Dehan sat down with a plastic tray bearing two coffees and two burgers with fries.

  “Forty-five minutes. Maybe a little less.”

  “How did he sound?”

  I bit into the burger and chewed for a bit, then swallowed and shrugged. “Worried, anxious. He asked all the right questions.”

  “What does your gut say?”

  I shrugged again, this time with my eyebrows. “My gut says I am starving, and I don’t know who is whom or what is what.”

  She grunted, bit and spoke with her mouth full. “Nothing is what it seems, and nobody is who they appear to be.”

  “Thanks.”
/>   She waved her burger at me, still chewing hungrily. “If nothing is real, everything is possible. You know who said that?” Before I could answer, she added, “It’s eleventh century Persian and can also be translated as, if nothing is real, everything is permissible.”

  “Hassan-e Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, founder of the Hashashin, from which word we derive both the words assassin and hashish.”

  “Huh, and there was me thinking I was going to teach you something.” She swallowed, then took another bite and asked with narrowed eyes, “Isn’t that what Schrödinger’s cat is all about?”

  I made a ‘maybe’ face. “Hash and murder? More Sinaloa than Schrödinger.”

  “Not Schrödinger, Schrödinger’s cat. In the box. He is both alive and dead till you open the box. If nothing is real, everything is possible.”

  I stuffed the last bit of burger in my mouth and scanned the lot while I chewed. When I had swallowed, I said, “You really do think about things like that at times like this, don’t you? I’m not sure, Dehan. Are you insane?”

  “Hey! It is when they are most relevant, right? When I die, I don’t want to be thinking, ‘The son of a bitch shot me!’ or, ‘Jeez, my pancreas hurts!’ I want to be thinking, ‘Huh! Now I get why the cat was alive and dead!’”

  I burst out laughing.

  She laughed back and asked, “Am I right?”

  “Yes. Yes, you are right.” I put my hand on her wrist. “By the way, Schrödinger thought the whole thing was a crock. He invented the whole cat story to show that Heisenberg and Niels Bohr were out of their minds.”

  “Heisenberg, now?”

  “Him and his uncertainty principle.”

  “Great.”

  “But they turned out to be right.”

  “And his cat?”

  “Both alive and dead. A bit like us. Let’s go. We’ll sit down by the river till he gets here.”

  We went out into the midday glare, crossed the small service road and stepped over the low barrier into the wasteland that sloped down from the gas station to the river below. There we found a fallen tree in the shade of some acacias. I sat on one of them to finish my coffee while we waited for D.C. to arrive, and Dehan leaned against the trunk of one of the acacias, sipping and watching me.