True Allegiance

She told the generals of the Guard that she didn’t want to see any fire at the helicopters unless fired upon; things were bad enough without starting a war. In the last few days, the helicopters had buzzed closer and closer, probing, prodding American response. The Americans merely observed. The Guard had no intelligence capacities; the feds hadn’t been particularly responsive since Davis’s big announcement. But Ellen had some private investigators do some digging. What they found shocked her.

Ciudad Juarez, they said, was run by the Juarez Cartel, one of the most dangerous criminal enterprises on the planet. Its leadership had been passed down through the Carrillo Fuentes brothers, who had turned it into a massive regional player, competing openly with powerhouses like the violent Sinaloa Cartel and spending a large chunk of their earnings on bribery of Mexican police officials. Operating across more than a score of Mexican states, the Juarez Cartel had engaged in bloody wars with the Sinaloa Cartel across the country, including in Ciudad Juarez.

Perhaps its most famous product, aside from drugs, was creative methods of dealing death: in 2006, a reporter for the UK Guardian detailed the horrors of what came to be called the House of Death, where US informants had been implicated in complicity with multiple murder. The House of Death had been discovered and put out of business years before, but the cartel still operated in force. The city of Ciudad Juarez became the center of a renewed turf battle between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels for control of the drug trafficking routes into Texas.

Only now, the violence in Juarez had stopped. The presence of American troops on the border meant that drug shipments slowed to a virtual standstill. Ellen’s investigators told her that the truce could mean only one thing: a plan to stir things up along the border. If the cartels could draw national attention to Texas’s militarization of the border, the media, they figured, would react by calling on Texas to step down. After all, the president of the United States had already labeled Texas treasonous for its failure to send help to New York. Any incident along the border that could be dumped at Davis’s feet would benefit the cartel; there simply was no national will to stand up to aggression along the southern border, not when the country was already recovering from the greatest terror attack in its history.

And so Ellen’s job had become to prevent violence. That job, she knew, would be a lot tougher than merely walking some troops back and forth along the Rio Grande or even flying patrols over the border. For three weeks, she’d kept the peace. She’d have to do better, she knew. One incident gone wrong could end Davis’s dreams of a safe Texas.

Ellen’s cell phone rang. New York number. She picked up.

“Hey, sweetheart.” Brett’s rich baritone rumbled through the phone.

“Hey, babe,” she said.

“Miss you.” His voice sounded thick over the phone, almost tearful. Just a few days ago, they’d been so close to reuniting. Now, with commercial air travel shut down and the crisis in New York, it could be weeks, they both knew. But this was something new, too: Brett never talked like this. Since the rescue from Iran, Brett hadn’t been himself. She could imagine why, and she could imagine his face. She longed to reach out and touch it.

“Miss you too. How’s Bill?”

“He’s hanging in there.” Another pause. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a no.” He laughed. So did she. “Davis made a mistake not sending the troops, you know.”

“I know,” she answered. “And I have a feeling something’s coming here. Something bad.”

“I’m getting the same feeling.”

“It’s not over, is it?”

A long pause. “No, I don’t think it is.”

Someone knocked at the door to Ellen’s office. “I’ve gotta run, babe,” she said. “Take a bullet for you.”

“Take a bullet for you, sweetheart.”

She hung up.

“Come in,” she called.

At the door stood a sergeant in the Guard. He held out a piece of paper. “Ma’am,” he said, “this came from HQ.”

She took the slip from his hand. She read it quickly. Then she dropped it and ran for the elevators.

The command headquarters was no more than a set of mobile homes set up along the border, within sight of the Rio Grande. Normally, Ellen operated out of the US Air National Guard military base at Biggs. By the time she arrived at the mobile home, a small crowd of journalists had formed outside. As she stepped out of her car, the cameras clacked away. The focus of the nation was certainly on New York, she thought, but that didn’t make the regional journalists any less hungry to get their footage on the national broadcast.

She saw the box as she stepped inside the empty room, sitting on a makeshift desk, a table somebody had culled from the local rec center. The box was cardboard, wet at the bottom. A wet plastic bag sat beside it. The box had been carved open at the top. She crept up on it, the pressure in her chest screaming at her not to look inside.

She did anyway.