Three Minutes Read online

  Perry checked the clock, which for lack of a better place was squeezed between the two screens.

  08:51:10

  Eight minutes and fifty seconds left.

  Twenty-two bodies stuffed into the boss’s office. Her office. And it wasn’t built for it. With the window closed, the door closed, it got extremely stuffy. But this was the only place she trusted, which never leaked.

  Sue Masterson stood in front of the wall facing the courtyard, which was covered by a full-color map of the United States, divided into twenty-one areas—the same number as her visitors. The twenty-one directors of the DEA’s domestic field divisions. In each field there were several marked sites. If someone, despite the heat, were to count them, they’d have added up to a hundred and nine sites, each representing a hub of one of America’s most active drug distributors—white points marked factories for converting cocaine into crack, black dots wholesale warehouses, green dots key personnel, yellow spots shipping agents. It was on these sorts of days, in these meetings, that her work—which sometimes felt like rolling a stone up a hill just to watch it roll down again, and again and again—felt meaningful. Preparing to crack down on nineteen domestic hubs simultaneously—smashing the second part of the chain, the ones who picked up where the South American producers left off, crushing the distribution of a Mexican cartel. Days when it all felt worth it.

  She never spoke with her colleagues about it. She and Erik had discussed it now and then, spoken of the forbidden, that it was exactly this that people like them lived for—how the criminality they lived to stop, because it killed, was a prerequisite for their own lives.

  Twenty-one faces in front of her and all starting to fade in this airless room. She could see they wanted to stand up, find some fresh air, stretch their legs, maybe smoke a cigarette. She wouldn’t let them. Not yet. She was aware of what they whispered about her in the hallways, but she’d gotten this far because she’d learned not to care—she simply put the same demands on others that she put on herself. And she wanted to go through this one more time.

  Masterson wanted to break down all one hundred and nine crackdowns into a single mission, that they could go through together, from a scout’s first observations to the final consequences of the arrests. She’d chosen the San Francisco division and a warehouse in Fresno as an example and was about to be sucked into a flow chart of one of the strike teams when the ringing began. Even though all phones were supposed to be turned off, her orders. And it continued—three rings, four, five. Until she realized it was coming from her own pocket. Her private phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you alone, ma’am?”

  It took a moment to identify the voice, it was no one she knew, but the few times they’d talked on the phone there’d been that same tone of stress, fear.

  “I’m a bit busy right now. I’ll call you back in half an hour.”

  “Well, ma’am, that will be . . . too late.”

  She looked up at twenty pairs of eyes focused on her. “One moment.” And lowered the phone. “I know you all want a break. You can take it now.”

  The scraping of chairs as they all quickly got up before she changed her mind—she waited until they were all out, and closed the door. Then she raised the receiver again. “Yes?”

  “Ma’am . . . This is Eddy. You asked me two days ago to help you, for Speaker Crouse’s sake, to give information to a non-American. And told me to keep you informed if I saw, or thought I saw, a certain person.”

  “I remember.”

  “I believe I did.”

  A man she’d only met in what they called the Crouse Room. An NGA operator who lived for his work among those monitors, which received images from cameras in the Colombian skies—the country that produced the cocaine they were currently preparing a crackdown on here in the United States.

  “And?” She waited for his voice, which was even weaker now.

  “For the last few hours, we’ve had our satellite trained on a property in Cali. A hotel, I believe. Or maybe . . . a brothel. On a street lined with other brothels. On orders directly from the White House—we’ve been passing on these images. To the Situation Room, to be specific, and to another operator who’s sitting there on behalf of the vice president. And about thirty minutes ago, that’s how long I had to search for your private number, I understood that this individual—which I believe to be the special individual you asked me to find—went into that particular property.”

  Stressed-out breathing from the other end of the line. She remembered how he looked and sounded after passing on classified information about satellite gaps to the Swedish detective, how, even though—like her—he was acting based on what he believed was right, in his case to secure Speaker Crouse’s freedom, in her case to keep someone she was responsible for alive, he nevertheless was ripped apart a little bit more by each new sentence.

  “And just now I got orders to pass on even more images to that same White House operator. Four of them. From helmets on Delta Force soldiers who are preparing an attack. My job is to receive and encrypt them. This means that I also see the unencrypted feed. And what I saw were images through a window just across the street from the . . . same building.”

  Masterson put down the phone on her desk, as she did when she needed to think. As if she needed distance, to be left alone.

  “Are you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Just one more thing—when I check those four image sources, I also see a clock. Posted at the right edge. A countdown. Right now it’s at . . . four minutes and twenty seconds.”

  She stared at the telephone, which demanded an answer—should she warn the informant who was her responsibility and risk the lives of American soldiers? If she interfered with life and death in this way, was she any better than that group in the Vice President’s office?

  “Hello? Ma’am?”

  Cali. Brothel. Jack of Hearts.

  “Thank you, Eddy . . .”

  The Seven of Hearts.

  “. . . you absolutely did the right thing by calling me.”

  Still this morning’s strange anxiety. Hoffmann sat there, alone, at the owner’s table in the empty brothel. A third cup of coffee, a glass of water, and five photographs that were supposed to be summed up, otherwise only silence. While El Mestizo continued to polish and clean, right now he was down behind the bar unscrewing the spout from an empty beer keg and screwing it back onto a newly filled one. And then tested to make sure it worked by filling up a glass and tasting it.

  “Ahhh, for fuck’s sake!” He threw the contents into the sink. “That beer’s not even fit for a bunch of johns! Tapir piss. That’s what it tastes like. And old tapir piss at that! I’m gonna have a talk with the people who brought us that shit. Later.” Then he went back over to the owner’s table to get the answer he wanted before they headed out on their first collection.

  “Well—have you thought it through, Peter? What do you think about those lovely photographs? About what happens to the people who betray me?”

  “What do I think? White bodies seem like a good ending to the story.”

  Five photos. The brightly colored parts. That was what took the longest time to make out. Naked, dismembered, Dutch torsos glistening pure white. Skin covered with a thick layer of cocaine. The message: money is not important, but trust is essential.

  “I almost lost my trust in you, Peter. And the whole time it was these handsome devils.” El Mestizo pointed to the five pictures with an index finger that smelled like beer. “But if you deceive me. Let me down. If you ever do that.”

  It was never quite clear what El Mestizo meant when he looked like that, his head bowed down, his neck prominent, his eyes glowing, while his mouth smiled weakly. “If you ever lose perspective, loyalty. You see how it’ll turn out, right?”

  If he was serious. If this was a game. He probably didn’t know himself.

  El Mestizo gathered the five photographs, put them back in the envelope. And
at that moment they both heard it. The phone. In Piet’s vest pocket.

  Johnny stared at it and at Piet—he did not like being interrupted. Not even by someone who had no idea they were interrupting.

  Hoffmann let it ring. But the ringing didn’t stop. He took it out, read the display. Her?

  He closed his hand around it, encapsulating it, and it continued to vibrate against his palm. A cautious glance at Johnny—the only one who could never know who was calling.

  The woman who . . . broke off contact?

  The ringing, the buzzing increased his irritation and cut through the space between them like a cold, sleek icicle on its way down. He’d tried to contact her so many times the past few days, needed to talk to her, needed her help, trying to figure out how to handle being put on a kill list that he shouldn’t be on—but he couldn’t do it here, now, with El Mestizo.

  Then silence, finally. Hoffmann let out a deep breath. He was about to put the phone back in his vest pocket—when it rang again. Her, again. Twelve rings. Until he had to. Had to answer it. “Yes?”

  “You see who it is?”

  Sue Masterson. It was her. Her voice brusque, forced.

  “Yes.”

  “The White House will be making a visit to that brothel in exactly one minute and forty seconds. Four customers.”

  The Situation Room.

  Perry looked around. Five occupied and eight empty chairs around an oblong conference table. Room for thirteen. As many as the deck of hearts they were eliminating one by one.

  He kept meeting the vice president’s gaze. Or, maybe she kept seeking out his, as if she wanted to share a curious meeting they’d had about images of a cage in a jungle, which only the two of them knew about. Sue Masterson’s desperate lie to save the man about to die on this screen—a lie they’d both seen through.

  Complete silence. Aside from a monotonous, hollow, electronic voice that belonged to the numbers at the bottom of the image, a voice that was counting down for the people in this room and for those who found themselves in a cramped hotel in Cali.

  “Sixty seconds.”

  Clenched, focused faces watched the two big screens on the White House walls. The CIA director and the Delta Force commander seemed slightly more interested in the screen divided into four equal squares—cameras attached to four elite soldiers’ helmets, who were waiting, impatient, ready to be released.

  “Forty-five seconds.”

  The vice president and FBI director focused their attention on the second screen, which showed a street in Cali waking up, hotels, or what were supposed to look like hotels, lined up block after block. One of them was marked with a flashing, red arrow—it belonged to a man named Johnny Sánchez, who was called El Mestizo and now the Jack of Hearts.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  They’d slowly closed in on him over the last few days. A hunt that ended in the surveillance of three addresses—two haciendas, one on the east side and one on the west side of Cali, and a brothel in the middle of the city. A brothel that, after further reconnaissance, became their main target—since it was mostly deserted between seven and ten every morning, while their objective was on site.

  “Fifteen seconds.”

  They’d waited. For the man who was often found in the company of the Jack of Hearts—then they could strike two names off their list simultaneously.

  And then just over half an hour ago, a male matching the vague description they had of the Seven of Hearts parked a car outside the brothel, vigilantly scanned his surroundings, and started walking toward the entrance.

  “Five, four, three, two, one . . . now.”

  The powerful people sitting at that table were now concentrated completely on only one of the monitors—the four soldiers, each with his own camera, moving from one side of the street to the other, getting in position outside two windows on the ground level at the far end of the brothel. Two soldiers, two cameras, at each window.

  And now everything happened at the same time, like a pair of gymnasts united in movement. The two frames at the top of the screen, helmet cameras whose wearers broke windows at the same time. The two frames at the bottom of the screen, helmet cameras whose wearers simultaneously dislodged stun grenades from their belts and pulled out the pins, threw them into the room.

  A bright, white light temporarily knocked out the picture, causing it to go dark before recalibrating. A heavy, roaring bang temporarily knocked out sound, muted the microphone before readjusting. And then. Another forty-seven seconds. Until everything would be over.

  Five pairs of eyes followed two identical films playing side by side. The same movements at the same time, even though the elite soldiers broke into the large room through two different windows. Uniformed arms using the butts of their automatic weapons to clear away the debris, the sound of broken glass landing on the floor inside, a quiet plunk against the bare walls, the soldiers preparing their weapons for a melee. The two synchronized gymnasts again—ten meters apart from each other in reality and a few centimeters on the screen—throwing a stun grenade, crouching, and jumping inside. Two images bouncing in parallel as they landed softly in a large hall where nobody who’d been inside would be able see after that bright light or hear after their eardrums shattered.

  The two soldiers stood up, synchronously. Each took a step forward, synchronously. They were met by a green laser and a muffled bang, synchronously. And both fell, forward. In their own arc. Until each frame was completely still, each head against the floor, one turned left, and the other just as quietly, turned right.

  Eleven seconds.

  They’d been shot. Two frames frozen. Because two helmet cameras lay at floor level, motionless, facing nothing.

  The people in suits in an underground room in Washington, DC, exchanged hasty glances. Fear. That was how they looked at each other, as if they were themselves lying there, dead.

  Two moving frames left. At the bottom of the screen. The two soldiers who’d been waiting behind each group leader jumped in now and landed in the same hall. And did it just as synchronously.

  They both looked over at the bodies lying in front of them and their cameras followed—even though five sets of eyes were in a room thousands of miles away around JFK’s conference table, still the details were clear. The face of one of them had a bullet hole in his forehead, round and smooth-edged, red blood slowly leaking out his life, probably a shot fired by a standing shooter. The other one had been hit in the nose, and you could see the exit hole from his helmet, a shooter must have been lying down and aiming up diagonally, no visible liquid, it was probably pooling in his helmet. The two remaining soldiers looked up at the same time, stepped over the lifeless bodies, and entered the room from opposite directions.

  But from that point on, they didn’t move synchronously. One was slightly more hunched, and both cameras registered glimpses of what could be a wood floor and several tables with chairs, some sort of raised area that looked like a small stage.

  Then the images changed. First, on the left, the soldier who’d advanced the farthest into the dark approached a bar and crouched, crept forward, and jumped over it, landed on the other side, and suddenly it was as if everything around him began to move . . . up. Tables, chairs, walls. Or, perhaps he was moving. Or falling, headlong, down.

  Perry glanced uneasily at the others, who were doing the same thing as him—trying to interpret what they were watching.

  It really was as if the helmet camera had fallen down, into a hole. Until it stopped, hit hard, a muted sound as it all ceased. A trapdoor. And one camera continued sending a single image—of a rough wall.

  Twenty-six seconds.

  Then there was a frame at the bottom right, the last one moving, changing. Making its way through a narrow aisle and along a stage with a polished stripper pole in the middle of it, approaching the booths and tables and chairs, escorted by the light mounted on the front of his weapon. Until something passed by in the image, from above, as if dropping over the ca
mera. And then the sound of someone struggling for air, gurgling, something pressed against the larynx and throat, as the whole picture lifted and the last Delta Force soldier was slowly strangled.

  They all responded differently. The CIA and FBI directors stared straight ahead, into the screen. Unreachable. The vice president’s gaze was locked, too, but on the table, confused, looking for something to hold on to, trying to start over, or hang on tight. The major general from Delta Force stood up near the big screen, silent, he’d run there as soon as the first two men had fallen. He seemed as if he wanted to jump into the picture, into South America and Colombia and Cali and the brothel where the Jack of Hearts and the Seven of Hearts should have been killed. Jump in and help, complete the attack on his own.

  Perry checked the clock between the two screens, forty-seven seconds, it said on four different images from four cameras. Everything was completely still. Resting against the floor, walls, ceiling. Images sent by cameras attached to heads that no longer moved. But then one of them did. One of the soldiers lying on his stomach with his head tilted obliquely to the side.

  A pair of boots appeared, the kind guerrillas wear, at the edge of the image. They grew larger, got nearer. Then a deep male voice who lifted the lifeless head the camera was sitting on, the murmur of words that were impossible to interpret, and then . . . total black. The camera had been shut off. The chief of staff, FBI director, CIA director, vice president, major general—they’d all seen it. And understood when those boots appeared in the next image, determined steps toward a helmet camera filming the ceiling because its owner was lying on his back. The same voice, the same mumbling, and a face covered by a protective mask and wearing noise-canceling headphones looked into the camera—at them—just before the camera was shut off.