Martin stepped inside. Serious and confident, he looked from one family member to another, all of them congregated as if summoned by a divine apparition. With the tip of one shoe, he pushed aside enough splintered wood to clear a space for his briefcase. He leaned down, deposited it, and in a smooth continuation of the same motion, he picked up the man’s gun.
“This is the Smith & Wesson you bought in 2000. No other weapons in the apartment, correct?”
“No others,” the man replied. There might have been a note of worry in his voice.
Martin smiled.
36
DEPENDENCY
New Orleans, Louisiana
Dupree left the fire chief’s office and took the interior stairs two at a time. His mind echoed with Michael Verdon’s offer to withhold information, as if granting a special concession. His Washington bosses apparently considered Tucker’s betrayal the most efficient way to proceed and thought he could be convinced to accept it. He went to the conference room they’d commandeered. No one was there. That meant the team was in the ops center.
Amaia, seated next to the supervisor and his deputy, was listening to incoming calls through headphones and watching the call log scrolling down the monitor. Dupree had to go up to her and wave a finger in front of the screen to attract her attention. “Salazar, come with me!” He turned and went to the door.
Dupree crossed to the conference room, where he started ripping down the brown paper that covered the windows. Amaia closed the door behind her and stood watching as her boss worked.
He turned. She could see from his expression he was serious. He was bottling up a lot of anger. “Salazar, I think you need to sit down for this.”
She stood where she was, staring at him. Maybe to encourage her, he went to the table, pulled out a couple of chairs, took one, and gestured toward the other. Amaia settled in across from him.
“You were in the ops center; I don’t have to tell you the hurricane was a lot more destructive than we expected. Most of the city has no power and no potable water. The eye of the hurricane passed to the east, sparing New Orleans from total destruction, but we know the water along the coast will go up almost twenty feet. The Coast Guard helicopters are back in the air, and imaging from the crews shows nothing but desolation. The French Quarter came through okay, but other parts of the city were flattened. The West End is flooded. Operation Cage, at least as we planned it, is a no-go. In the face of all this, I need everyone on the team to be totally committed.” He paused and looked down for a moment. “Salazar, Washington told me that your aunt called from Spain. I’m sorry to have to give you the news: your father died yesterday morning.”
Amaia took a deep breath. She needed all the air in the room, all the air in the world. Dupree went back to the now-exposed window, worked at the latch, and got it to open. He pushed, and the sash of the tall, narrow window rose with a ripping sound as it pulled duct tape off the casement.
The humid, smelly air surged in. The sudden draft swept all the photographs off the tables onto the floor in total confusion. Amaia stared down at them.
Dupree studied her expression for a moment, then started toward the door. “I’m going to be with the rest of the team in the ops center. If things go as we expect, it won’t be long before the call comes in. It’s up to you. If you decide to leave, I’ll try to get you transportation back to the naval air station. The last I heard, they were bringing in a Marine Corps aviation team to evacuate the remaining FBI personnel. Once you get away from the storm, you can book a plane ticket to Spain.”
Amaia sensed his presence as he started past her and then paused for an instant. He extended his hand as if to touch her shoulder but dropped it instead. She heard him quietly close the door behind him.
She bent over to pick up the photo that had landed closest to her. She studied it for a few seconds, folded it in half and then in quarters, and tucked it inside her blouse.
37
OUR FATHER
Elizondo
Amaia inhaled the rich aroma of melted butter. She liked it better than that of caramelized sugar, which the least moment of inattention could convert into a smell as acrid as burned embers, or the smell of flour, a coarse, primal odor that was deceptively mild but as suffocating as dirt from a grave.
She watched her father working heavy sheets of pastry dough. Her heartbeat accelerated. A Strauss waltz wafted from the radio he kept on while he worked. He smiled when he saw her, and she tried to reciprocate, but couldn’t. How can you tell someone you love something that you know will make him terribly unhappy? She seemed to observe herself from above, a nine-year-old girl standing hesitant behind him, searching for words that by all rights she shouldn’t know at all. She loved him so, so much . . .
She listened to the impetuously accelerating waltz on the radio, imperial and elegant and completely inappropriate for talking about her fears. She pressed her lips together in a determined expression. She knew then that she wasn’t going to tell him, because if she did, he’d stop smiling, he’d turn off the radio, and the waltz would disappear into the ether, to be replaced by the crackling sound of hot ovens and the relentless drip of water from the faulty faucet at the deep steel sink.
It cost her to hold back. Her chest constricted. A deep pain forced her to close her eyes. She couldn’t look at him. Her lids squeezed out a single tear, silent and heavy. It slid down her cheek just as her father turned to smile at her.
“May I have this dance, Princess?”
His smile vanished instantly. He knelt before her and traced his finger along the track the tear had left on her cheek. “What’s wrong, darling?”
Amaia kept her lips pressed tightly together as she looked at him and struggled, agonized, against her inevitable fate. She threw her arms around his neck and pressed herself to his chest so she wouldn’t have to look in his eyes.
Juan hugged her, deeply distressed.
“Amaia?” he called in a worried voice. He picked her up and seated her on the edge of his steel worktable so that they were face to face. He released her long enough to switch off the radio, then took her hands and kissed them. “Tell me what’s happening, dearest.”
The waltz was gone forever. She heard the crackling of the lit ovens, the constant drip of that faucet. The sensation of déjà vu was so overpowering that it almost made her ill as she feared the outcome of her confession. From this moment on, that place and those sounds would bring to her mind the dark recollections of a night, of death, spurring in her a survival instinct that bid her to flee as fast as possible.
She opened her mouth and described the horror.
“Ama,” she managed to say through sudden sobs. “She scares me . . . she makes me really afraid. At night, when you’re asleep, she comes to my bed.” The terror of it replaced her desperate shame, and her eyes opened wide. “Ama wants to eat me, she really does! She says she’s going to gobble me up, and if you don’t stop her, she will!”
Juan looked away from his daughter’s pleading eyes and, vacantly, into the middle distance.
In his mind he hears the swish of the bedclothes. The floorboards creak beneath the light tread of his wife’s feet as she crosses the room in the dark. Juan sits up, turns to his left to peer toward the door, opens his eyes wide in the dark as if somehow that will help him hear better. The girls’ room is directly across the hall. Rosario takes two steps or maybe three to get from one door to the other. He hears her move and sometimes makes out a low murmur of words that he doesn’t manage—or want—to understand. Only a minute passes, a tiny minute during which all his senses are intensely focused as he holds his breath and prays this will not last any longer than that agonizing eternal minute. He senses his wife’s return. Juan lies back, careful not to make noise, and pretends to be sleeping. She lies down at his side. Even without touching her, he knows the chill in the house has penetrated her body. Her heart is beating wildly. It’s over, it’s done, and she won’t get up again tonight. But he doesn’t dare relax until he’s sure that she’s sleeping.