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Moslehi—had stopped in the desert outside of Palm Springs for Fajr, the morning prayer.
    It had felt … good. God, Reyshahri knew, would forgive him for missing the appointed prayers during his journey north out of Mexico. Here, away from Mendoza and his filthy Sinaloan coyotes, it was possible once again to think about the mission.
    The mission began … here.
    This part of East Los Angeles was a teeming barrio of tenements, housing projects, and houses crammed together in festering, noisy mayhem less than ten kilometers from downtown L.A. The population here was almost exclusively Hispanic, most of them from Mexico. The safe house was a single-family home attached to a mechanic’s garage on East Olympic Boulevard, just off the Santa Ana Freeway. Reyshahri noticed a Mexican flag hanging from the eaves of a house across the street, and a brick wall nearby had been daubed with white paint, in letters two meters high: “¡VIVA AZTLÁN!”
    Excellent. He didn’t speak Spanish, but he knew what the words meant.
    â€œOur contact here is Manuel Alvarado,” Moslehi told him as they got out of the car and walked up the rotting steps and onto the front porch. Inside, a dog barked.
    â€œAnother cartel member?” Reyshahri asked. He glanced surreptitiously left and right. There were guards out, though not obviously so. A group of young men on the street corner. Other men sitting on porches, or lounging casually on front stoops.
    â€œNo. But he is a dedicated Aztlanista.”
    Alvarado answered the doorbell—an old man, white-haired and missing his front teeth. He carried a Smith & Wesson .38 in a shoulder holster over his filthy sleeveless tee. “¿Quien es?” he asked, looking at Reyshahri with suspicion.
    â€œThis is the colonel I told you about,” Moslehi replied in English. “He is with us.”
    â€œOkawb,” Reyshahri added.
    Alvarado gave a curt nod and admitted them. “You’ll want to see the … stuff?”
    â€œPlease,” Reyshahri said. “It all arrived safely?”
    Alvarado grunted and led them to a locked door off the kitchen. A couple of men with shotguns stood aside for them. “One truck hasn’t arrived yet,” Alvarado said. “There may have been a problem in Tucson.”
    â€œWhat problem?”
    A shrug. “ Los federales. Maybe a problem. Maybe not. We’ll see.”
    Not good. If the Border Patrol or the FBI had intercepted one of the shipments, it could tip them off to Shah Mat. More likely, though, the Americans would parade the captured materials as evidence that they were winning their vaunted war on drugs, and not think about what that seizure represented.
    The door opened into the back of the garage, a huge open space that served now as a warehouse. On every side, crates and cartons were stacked on pallets almost from floor to ceiling. There were drugs, yes, but most of the boxes were filled with something just as dangerous—weapons and ammunition.
    Reyshahri pulled up the lid on one crate already opened. Inside were military assault rifles—twelve of them, wrapped in translucent plastic. He picked one up and stripped off the protective covering. It was an M-16A4, factory fresh. Prominently stamped on the crate was the FNH USA logo. Another crate nearby, longer but narrower, carried the Saco Defense Systems logo. Inside, also carefully wrapped, was an M-60E3 light machine gun.
    Other crates held ammunition of various calibers, hand grenades, and plastic explosives. Most was American manufactured, though there were a few foreign imports. The RPG-7s were Iranian, manufactured by the Defense Industries Organization, or DIO. They’d reached Los Angeles by way of Syria and Hezbollah.
    There were weapons and ammunition enough here to equip a small army—which was precisely why they’d been smuggled across the border from Mexico, a few crates at a time, and at great