“Funny thing. I was at my father’s side the entire time. And you know what? We never argued, there was never a harsh word between us. Normally we argued constantly. But when the chips were down . . .”

For a moment her eyes welled up, and she fought back tears.

“The only time in our lives—before or since—that we got along, was while the most horrible thing was happening to us. If my father and I could have spent our lives fighting a horrible, grueling, vicious war, we might have been great friends.”

She blew out a long breath, centered herself.

“Eventually it all fell apart. As time went on we could feel the negotiations going wrong. The go-between cop was a fool, incompetent. Too stupid even to be properly corrupt. At the very end, we were supposed to make the swap. When you do these things, you hire a man to carry the money. We paid. My father paid something like six hundred thousand U.S. dollars. An incredible amount. And we never saw them or the money again.”

Fisk said, “Never?”

She shook her head. “Not alive. They were identified two years later, after their deaths. Drug addicted, infected with hepatitis, bodies covered in sores. They had been sold as sex workers and held captive in a city eighty miles south of Mexico City. They had been kept inside security houses known as a calcuilchil, or “houses of ass.” Mirrored glass for windows, so outsiders cannot see who is living inside. They were both shot in the head. Perhaps trying to escape, perhaps . . . I’ll never know.”

She was nodding slightly to mask her trembling.

Fisk said, “I don’t know what to say . . .”

“Or what to think, I know. It’s my hell. Each of us, we’ve been through something, we’ve been marked, scarred, changed. I tried to go on, maybe like you are now. I took a job at the Ministry of Justice, filing papers, doing all the things junior prosecutors do. But I was insane inside, crazy. Doing reckless things. I was not cut out for the work. I may have had an appetite for the mission. But not for the job itself.

“Then, as I said earlier, one day I arranged to go out with the PF . . . something I had been thinking about for some time . . . and everything fell into place. I was no more built to be a lawyer than I was an artist. Not for the girl who used to wreck dirt bikes in the country. So I joined the PF and you know the rest of the story, the one I told you earlier.”

Fisk was processing this. “Please tell me this doesn’t link up somehow to Chuparosa.”

She looked puzzled. “No. I know who took my mother and sister. Who sold them like drugs to men who treated them like nothing.”

“Who?”

“Ochoa. Do you know the name?”

Fisk did. It was a moment coming to him. “Vaguely.”

“German Ochoa. He ran the Guerrero Cartel. Guerrero is close to Central America, and he was tapped into Colombian cocaine. But that wasn’t enough, of course, and his crimes extended into human trafficking, among other things. But soon after the kidnapping of my mother and sister—perpetrated not by him directly, of course, but by his men, operating under his protection and control—his empire began to crumble. He was fantastically rich, of course. You realize that the goal of these cartel leaders is not to sell drugs. It is to make money and remain free to spend and enjoy it. That is why he essentially bought the former iteration of Mexican Intelligence. He was worth billions.”

Fisk got it. “He’s the plastic surgery guy.”

She nodded. “He underwent extensive surgery, including a full facial reconstruction, liposuction, everything. And died on the operating table. Heart attack, or anesthesia overdose—it’s not known. Your DEA identified the body using DNA recovered from his house. Six weeks later his doctors were discovered in barrels encased in concrete, their corpses showing evidence of torture. ‘Uncle Ochoa.’ Disgusting.”

“And the Guerrero Cartel?”

“The cartel names are fluid. One disappears, another rises immediately to take its place. So no . . . my revenge has no direct outlet. But Chuparosa, above all others, reminds me of the brutality of Ochoa, who died before I could do anything about it.”

Fisk sat there, not knowing what to say. He wanted to refill his glass, and yet he had lost his taste for the wine.

Garza said, “You will look at me differently now, you will think of me differently. But here is the thing. It could have been me. If I wasn’t away at school . . . it would have been me. That is my reality. Ochoa would have served me up just like he did my mother and my sister—who were not rag dolls, by the way. They were not fighters as I am now . . . as I have made myself to be . . . but they must have fought, as much as they could. They were brutalized. They were victimized. And here I stand on the other side. A woman of the law, who looks out for the victims now. Who acts for those who cannot.”

“And your father?”

“He suffered, too. And then he moved away from Mexico City, to California. Remarried.”

Fisk said, “You resent that.”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I envy him.” She leaned closer, speaking so that no one else could ever hear. “You faced down the man who murdered your lover. You saw your revenge.”

Fisk said, “I arrested him.”

“You faced him and you stopped him. You won. There was an ending. For me, there is no ending.”

Fisk sat back. She had touched something deep inside him, and he wanted to express this correctly.

He said, “All I can tell you is that it is never the victory you think it will be.” Fisk was remembering Jenssen’s words to him in that prison room, about America’s tolerant system of justice. Its weakness for the rule of law. “We have to be better than those we hunt. It is the very thing that defines us. We lose that . . . then we are lost ourselves. This cycle of murder and retribution, be it personal or international . . . it sickens us a little, just being exposed to it. Like radiation poisoning. There is no end. There is no cure.”

Garza listened, but it seemed to Fisk she was trying to understand how these words related to him—rather than giving any thought to how they related to herself.

“Aren’t you glad you asked?” she said. “About me?”

“Yes,” Fisk said, and meant it. “I want to know more about you.”

Her eyes narrowed a bit, shadowed by the candle flame. “You know the worst, and still you want to know more?”

Fisk nodded. “I think I want to know everything.”

She looked confused for a moment. Almost amazed. Then—as always—she pulled back. “Maybe we are too much alike. Maybe we have found our counterpart and simply want to ask it questions. Maybe we are a two-person support group.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Maybe it’s the Malbec.”

“Maybe. And exhaustion. And overload.” He conceded all those points. “And maybe it’s more than all that.”

She smiled as though he might be right. “Tomorrow,” she said. “I won’t be distracted. I cannot be distracted. Not until . . . after tomorrow.”

“After tomorrow,” Fisk said.

Her eyes had gone dark again, her expression hard. He could tell she was picturing the image of Chuparosa in her head, visualizing him. Wondering where he was at that very moment, what he was doing, what he was thinking.

She stood, and so did Fisk.

“To be continued,” she said.

No handshake, no good-bye. He watched her walk out of the lounge and into the hotel lobby.

CHAPTER 51

Dubin called him into his office at Intel first thing in the morning.

He did not look happy. He stood immediately as Fisk entered. “You’re dropping the ball on UN Week.”