Chapter 59: Dockside Recon

Rayén

I had the note crushed in my fist before the door finished opening.

Lautaro was off the sofa in one movement, gun already up, shoulder against the wall. The dark hall swallowed everything but a thin blade of light and a man's shape.

"Patrón." Carlos's voice, low and out of breath. "Don't shoot. It's me."

Nobody lowered anything.

"I gave you a keycard for a fire," Lautaro said. "Is the building on fire?"

"Something worse." Carlos stepped inside and shut the door softly behind him. He was still in the gala valet's uniform, sweat darkening the collar. "I followed Brandt's security out of the terminal. Twelve men, in two vans. They went to the far dock, number nine, and they're loading a ship. Tonight. Right now."

"What kind of ship?"

"No name on the hull." His eyes flicked to me, and then away, too fast. "Someone painted it out."

I slid the note into the pocket of my robe. My fingers felt like they belonged to somebody else. I should have said something. I should have pulled it out and put it in Lautaro's hand and watched his face. But Maitén had written ask him, and some small, stubborn, humiliating part of me wanted to find out if he'd tell me before I made him.

"Give us ten minutes," Lautaro said.

The port at three in the morning smelled of diesel and rotting fish and wet iron. We went in through a gap in a chain-link fence Carlos swore was unwatched, then up a ladder bolted to the side of a container stack, thirty feet over the dock. I wore Lautaro's black jacket over a sweater and borrowed jeans, and my hair was braided so tight my scalp ached.

At the top, Lautaro went down on one knee and held out his hand without looking.

I took it. I hadn't planned to. His palm was warm, callused, and he pulled me up as if I weighed nothing. When I was beside him on the steel, flat on my stomach, our shoulders pressed together, he didn't let go right away.

"You're quiet," he whispered.

"I'm working."

"You've been working since the elevator."

"Then let me work."

A beat. Then, very softly, "Whatever she said to you, Rayén..."

"Look at the dock."

He looked at the dock. I felt him do it, the effort of it, the way you feel someone swallow a sentence whole.

Dock nine lay under a few sodium lamps, and a rust-streaked freighter hunched against it, black hull, lights off. A crane arm swung a pallet over the rail. Men worked below in shirtsleeves, moving fast and quiet, the way you move when you've done something many times and don't want to be seen doing it.

I raised the binoculars Carlos had handed me. My hands were steady. I was proud of that.

The first man I knew was the big one by the gangway, bald and thick-necked, a cigar clamped in his teeth. Osvaldo Quiroga. He'd carried me on his shoulders at my fifth birthday party. He'd taught me how to whistle through my fingers.

Then his brother, Tadeo, lifting a crate with both arms. Then the thin one, Ismael, who'd once let me sit in the front seat of my father's car when I was eleven and told me not to tell. All three of them were Beltrán's. Not Altiplano soldiers. His. They'd followed him out of my father's house the way dogs follow the man who feeds them.

"Beltrán's personal guard," I breathed. "All of them. Ten years together."

"Then he's here," Lautaro said.

"Or he wants us to think he is."

A crate slipped as it swung onto the deck. It hit the steel with a crack, and the lid sprang loose. Even from thirty feet up, I saw what slid out across the planks, long and oiled and unmistakable.

Rifles. Dozens of them, bedded in straw.

My mouth went dry. "That's Altiplano stock."

"How can you tell?"

"The stocks. My father had every rifle in the armory carved with a condor, hidden under the grip, so nobody could say they'd lost one." I adjusted the lens, and the details swam into focus. "Look. Third from the left. See it?"

I felt him stiffen. "Those were supposed to be destroyed. After the war, I signed the order myself."

"Somebody didn't read it."

"Or somebody read it and lied to me." His voice was almost gentle, and that made it worse. "Rayén, that's enough firepower to take a city."

"Not take," I said. "Hold. You don't load rifles onto a ship unless you plan to leave with something big, or arrive somewhere you shouldn't be."

We watched them stack crate on crate. Two more men carried a long wooden box between them, slowly, carefully, the way you carry something that could go off. When they set it down, Osvaldo crouched, spoke low to the box, and crossed himself.

An old fear moved under my skin. I'd seen him do that exactly once, at the funeral of my father's brother. When the coffin went into the ground.

"Lautaro." It came out cracked. "That's the shape of a coffin."

He said nothing. I turned my head and found him staring at me, and for an instant the mask was gone. There was something so raw and so frightened in his face that I almost forgot every word on that cream-colored paper.

"Whatever's in that box," he said, "it isn't for me."

"How do you know?"

"Because I've been waiting six years for it, and I don't think I want to know what's inside anymore."

My heart slammed against the steel. "What does that mean?"

"It means..." He stopped. His jaw worked. "Not here. Please. If I say it here, I'll never get you to listen to the rest."

The phone in my jacket buzzed.

Once. Twice. A private number, no name.

Lautaro's eyes went to my pocket, then to me. "Don't."

I answered anyway.

"Little condor." The voice was dry and warm and utterly calm, a voice that had read me bedtime stories in my father's study. "You've grown tall. Third container from the left, yes? I always did say you had your mother's patience."

Cold flooded my body. Beside me, Lautaro had gone still, sensing it without hearing a word.

"Beltrán," I whispered.

"I'd tell you not to move," he said gently, "but I'm afraid it's already too late for that. Look at the chest of the man beside you, mija. Just look."

I turned my head slowly.

A bead of red light sat quivering over Lautaro's heart.

And another, at the base of my throat.