The Savage Dead by Joe McKinney Read Free Book Online Page B

she was concerned. The cartels had learned early on that the NSA routinely monitored international e-mail accounts. Anything going in or out of the country was scanned for key words and hot button topics by some of the most sophisticated software analytics ever devised. And when items of interest were developed, they were copied and read and the senders placed on the watch lists for more intensive scrutiny.
    The Porra Cartel had figured out ways to be careful. Anytime they needed to relay large amounts of computer files, as she’d done with all the information she’d lifted from Paul Godwin’s phone, they simply typed up an e-mail on the dummy account they shared and saved that e-mail in the draft folder. A simple routine was devised. When a scheduled check of the account was due, as hers was now, she simply logged in using the password they shared and checked for drafts. Unless the NSA knew the account name and the password, they stood almost no chance of intercepting the message.
    Waiting in the drafts folder was a single message, written in Ramon Medina’s clipped, terse style:

    M . . . esto es algo bueno que lo puedo usar . . . en el edificio gris en Potranco y Westover Hills . . . lo que necessita aqui y ahora . . . R

    That was good, she thought. He’d liked what she’d sent him and felt like it was something they could use.
    Great.
    Now to see what he wanted her to do about it.
    He’d given her directions to meet him, and she had a vague idea of where he meant. Ramon Medina never used the same place twice, but he generally felt more comfortable on San Antonio’s west side.
    She got on Loop 410 and headed west. The roads were nearly empty, much as the airport had been. Pilar put the car on cruise control—even though her Monica Rivas identity was airtight and the cops would never find anything if they stopped her, there was no reason to leave a footprint if she could help it—and headed into the darkness at the edge of town.
    Her thoughts kept turning back to Lupe. The Texas Highway Patrol had finally rescued her from the eighteen-wheeler, but not before Lupe and thirty-nine others died of heatstroke. After that, she went to sleep every night hating herself, blaming herself for his death. She’d wake up in the morning hoping it had all been a sick nightmare, but of course it wasn’t. He was just a child. He had counted on her, believed in her, and she’d let him down. That was the part that really chewed her up inside. She’d been careless. And now he was dead.
    The Border Patrol had taken her from the Highway Patrol, questioned her, assigned her an identity card, and put her on an old school bus with bad air conditioning. Then they’d driven her back to the border, back to Ciudad Juarez. There they’d turned her out, a ten-year-old orphan left to wander the streets of the murder capital of the world. Other girls her age were forced into prostitution, but not Pilar. She learned to avoid the gangs, and even managed to steal the food she ate from right under their noses.
    Ramon Medina was a young man then, still in his early twenties. He’d made a name for himself with a string of eight-liner gambling houses that catered to the American tourists, dozens of whorehouses and, of course, a tight leash on the growing trans-border drug trade. His personal office was one of the places Pilar went to steal food, and, more and more, money.
    For two years she stole from him, until one night when he and three of his men had surprised her rifling through his safe, which she had learned to crack on one of her first visits. One of the men tried to grab her, but she fought him. He was three times her size, and still she fought. She almost got away, too. She would have, if Ramon hadn’t put a pistol to the back of her head.
    “So young,” he said. “And so ready to die.”
    She closed her eyes and waited for the shot.
    But it didn’t come.
    For as different as the cartels were, they all shared a strong patriarchal