The Border Lords Read Online Free PDF Page A

diving. You don’t get to stop and breathe at a certain depth on your way up. You don’t have a buddy. You just shoot to the surface and bob there and hope somebody picks you up. Then, boom! You go back under. Down to the depths.”
    She stood suddenly, then seemed embarrassed. She sat again. Hood wondered at the calm Seliah he had come to know, and now this anxious new one. It looked like the undercover work had gotten to her, too. According to the ATF agent runners he had talked to, it usually did.
    “Do you think he has another woman?” asked Bly.
    “He has another life. So why not another woman to go along with it?”
    “You should have told us he was in trouble, Seliah,” said Hood. “That was always the agreement. You had the training, too. That was your part of this operation.”
    “Sean begged me not to tell you. He wanted to do something big and something good. He didn’t want to be brought in. He wanted to set it right with Jimmy. So . . .”
    She rose again to adjust a wall thermostat. Hood heard the air conditioner click on. Seliah went to the shaded window, then stepped away from the muted light and looked at them again.
    “I looked into my heart, Charlie. It wasn’t hard to see in. My heart has always been big and simple and obvious. My loyalty was to Sean. Not to ATF. Not to Blowdown. Not even to you, and you’re the best friend we’ve had through this.”
    Hood’s spirit withered when he heard the words best friend . What kind of a friend let this happen? What kind of friend failed to register such pain? True, Sean was a fine actor. And he’d acted well during their few hours together, here and there, over the last fifteen months. Seliah, too. They’d fooled Bly and Morris and Velasquez and Soriana and Mars. But doesn’t a friend know? Doesn’t a friend see ?
    “Three months ago, almost exactly one year in, he was close to breaking,” said Seliah. “So we took off together. July, Costa Rica. It was somewhere we’d always wanted to go. Two weeks, just us, traveling around a beautiful country. We stayed in a cloud forest and on the beach and even up on the Arenal Volcano. We leased a little plane and tooled around it. No phones, no cartels, no ATF. Sean presented that trip to you as a much-needed break for me. You have no idea how exhausted and bitter he was. Everything came out.”
    “Bitter,” said Hood.
    “He thought the war on drugs was a sham and a scam. He thought the United States was arrogant and ignorant to throw away millions of dollars and quality guys like Jimmy Holdstock and sell it as a ‘war.’ He thought ATF was a pawn in that war, a bureau that wasn’t given the right tools to do its job. He felt betrayed. He thought the Mexican government was even worse. The billions still come into Mexico year after year after year. What government would try to stop that? What government would shut down sixty percent of its own economy and turn legions of cartel gunmen, growers and traffickers into the unemployed? There would be another Mexican revolution. Guaranteed.”
    Seliah looked out the shaded window, then closed the drapes. A slat of evening light came through the center line. Hood watched her snug the drapes together and the light disappeared.
    “We talked about a career change for him. Maybe teaching, which is something he’d always wanted to do. He’s got a degree in economics. Of course he loves to fly, so we thought maybe he could do some charter work. Maybe firearms training, or consulting. It’s complicated because he’d lose some retirement unless he stayed a fed, and he might have to take a pay cut in this economy. Still, we talked about it. That was a first for us, just the idea that there was life after ATF.”
    She sat down on the chair again.
    “Then, one week into the trip to Costa Rica, something happened to Sean. Something good. We were on the volcano at Arenal, staying in a little hotel. You could see the volcano from our room, this big, smoking,