The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (111)

TWENTY-FIVE




Standing in the crowd, Letty was gripped by the idea that she was stuck, that she was letting events run over her. As the school bus edged forward, a group of Mexican border patrolmen lined up at the edge of the bridge to block the bus and the people behind it. Then nothing happened.

But something was going to happen.

The highway down to the bridge was flanked on the left side by the substantial American border station, which included the main building plus two smaller buildings surrounded by a large parking lot meant to hold eighteen-wheelers while they were being inspected. On the right side of the highway, the mountains sloped down to the Rio Grande flood plain, which was several hundred yards across. Probably once used for agriculture, it was now half-covered by scrubby brush, while a portion of the plain closest to the river was plowed and mown bare, right down to the dirt, with hardly a weed poking up.

Letty walked back up the hill, far enough that she wouldn’t be noticed as she crossed the highway and pushed into the brush and began to make her way through it, back down the hill again. The going was rough: scrubby, tangled pinions and woody bushes plucking at her blouse, her hat, the backpack, and her hair. She made her way to the sandy flood plain, crossed a dirt track, and then moved carefully on through the jungle of brush and weeds on the plain to the point where the plowed ground started. Sitting just inside the brush line, she slipped off the pack, took out the monocular, and looked at the bridge, where she’d seen the men disappear earlier in the day.

She didn’t see them immediately, because they weren’t moving, but after a fast scan, she did a slower inspection, and one of the men raised an arm, and she picked him up. There were two of them, tucked in the shadows under the Mexican end of the bridge, dressed from head to toe in camo.

Scanning the underside of the structure, she began picking up what she thought might be the explosives; she wasn’t sure of that, but she could see changes of color at the ends of the red-painted support beams. The beams, she thought, were the same size as the one that had been cut in half by the C-4 experiment they’d seen with Hawkes and the others at the mountain off I-10.

Then the men stood up, as if on a command, did something under the bridge that she couldn’t see, then moved down the slope toward the river, still concealed beneath the structure from eyes at either end.

One of the men was carrying something metallic. As she watched, the two men paused near the end of the first slab on the Mexican side and began working with the metallic object . . . a lightweight aluminum extendable ladder. They put it up against the bridge support structure, one of the men climbed it, did something under the bridge, came down, carried it over to the other side of the two-lane bridge, climbed again, and did something again.

Setting the timers on the explosive, Letty thought. The C-4 was already in place. They were going to take down the bridge.

The river, which might not even have been called that in Minnesota—more like a big creek—was shallow beneath the bridge, and the men waded halfway across to a support structure that stood in the middle. The ladder was extended, and one of the men climbed it while the other supported the ladder.

Letty watched: they’d have to do this six more times. That would take a while.

She backed into the brush, and, careful not to disturb the foliage any more than she had to, she worked her way back across the flood plain, across the dirt track to the mountainside, then up a hundred feet or so, and cut back toward the highway. At seven-fifteen, as she was approaching the highway, the handset vibrated, and she sat down on the hillside and called back: “You there?”

“Here,” Kaiser said.

“Gonna blow the bridge,” Letty said.

“How soon?”

“Don’t know. I’ll find out. Monitor this channel.”



* * *





Before she emerged from the brush, Letty plucked the twigs and burrs from her clothing, then checked across the street. There were townspeople moving around, some walking uphill, some down toward the bridge. Two pickups went by fast, heading down the hill, then another one.

She stepped out of the brush, and walking down the hill, no one paid her any attention. The militia was buzzing, people moving fast, loading up trucks. Two more pickups went by, and near the bottom of the hill, they turned off on a dirt road that she’d crossed on her way to spy on the bridge.

Letty rejoined the crowd at the bottom and edged as close as she could to the front, where a line of militiamen was blocking the American crowd from the bridge.

Hawkes, Low, Duran, and Crain were standing at the near end of the bridge, looking across at the militiamen who still stood in a line nearly at the Mexican side. Rodriguez and his camerawoman were standing next to Hawkes. Ochoa had taken the camera off her shoulder and was resting it on her foot, talking to the husky man who’d been her mobile platform. They apparently didn’t think anything was imminent.

The sun had dropped below the hills on the Mexican side, puffy clouds going orange and then lavender overhead. Letty checked her phone: 7:40.

She felt the handset vibrate. She walked back out of the crowd, up the hill to the locked-up TV truck, stepped behind it, then around to the far side where she couldn’t be seen.

She called Kaiser: “What?”

“Something’s happening here. The guys watching us pulled out. They’re gone.”