Target America: A Sniper Elite Novel by Scott McEwen Page B

to do with the bomb,” he said. “I’m a business man, not a terrorist.” She made a pssh sound at that. “I don’t want to be blamed for this explosion just because it happened in my territory in one of my tunnels. Do you understand?”
    Did that slip about the tunnel? she wondered. Or was he throwing me a bone?
    “Okay,” she said, “I don’t see a problem with that. If you didn’t do it, you didn’t do it.”
    He looked at her, his half-lidded eyes taking on a menacing air for the first time. “What I am telling you is that I do not want to be hunted.”
    “Excuse me, but you’re a drug lord; you’re already hunted. Nobody on either side of the Rio Grande is going to just forget about you.”
    “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I am not hunted the way you think I am hunted. I have friends who protect me: friends among the army and the police who warn me not to be in certain places when it is dangerous for me to be there. Do you understand?”
    She drew a breath and sighed. “Of course. This is Mexico, after all.”
    “So,” he continued, “these friends, these people who protect me, would be forced to turn their backs on me if I were labeled a nuclear terrorist. Some of them might even find it advantageous to betray certain of my secrets, which would undoubtedly lead to my capture. Is this making sense to you? Are you located high enough in your agency to guarantee that I will not be associated with this bomb; that I will not be labeled a nuclear terrorist?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “Most of what you’re offering sounds to me like information we’d uncover on our own in due course.”
    He sat back, extending his arms across the back of the pew. “Has your army isolated the isotopes yet? If they have, then you know it was a uranium bomb and not plutonium . . . and in time you will discover that it was probably enriched at the Soviet enrichment facility in the Urals.”
    For Castañeda to know this level of detail meant the rest of his information might be reliable, because she herself had only been made privy to the isotope results a few hours earlier, and as yet there had been no public disclosure. If he was correct about the bomb being made with Russian uranium—which the army would not be able to determine right away—that was absolutely going to set a cat among the pigeons. Castañeda had already given her enough intel to ensure her superiors’ ongoing confidence—provided she was able to get out of the cathedral alive—but she really wanted that office in Langley, so she began to angle. “What I can guarantee is this,” she said. “I’ll do everything I can to make sure you’re not blamed or associated with the bomb. It wouldn’t be advantageous for my government to blame the wrong person anyhow.”
    “In other words, you have the authority to guarantee me nothing.”
    “Look,” she said, “nobody would in a situation like this. Clearances have to be obtained. You were military. You know how it works.”
    He leaned forward again, very close to her this time because there were people passing behind them. “What kinds of guarantees would your government have given for information that could have prevented 9/11?”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    He sat back and smiled. “Use your imagination.”
    “The bomb already went off.”
    “Did it?” he asked, the smile lingering as he got to his feet. “You can contact me at the usual email address if and when you are able to make the necessary guarantees.”
    “Wait!” she said, experiencing a burst of inspiration. “If you really do have the kind of information that you’ve just implied, then . . . for a little extra, I can give you the guarantees you’re looking for.”
    He sat back down. “Extra? What extra?”
    “In exchange for being left alone—which is what you’re really asking for here, let’s be honest—you’re going to have to cool it with the violence on both sides of the border.