An Acceptable Sacrifice

with his questions. Harris was on the cusp of becoming curious. And that would not be good. Billings was not prepared to share what had been troubling him for the past several hours, since the new intelligence assessment came in: that he and his department might have subcontracted out a job to assassinate the wrong man.
    There was now some doubt that Cuchillo was in fact head of the Hermosillo Cartel.
    The intercepts Billings’s people had interpreted as referring to drug shipments by the cartel in fact referred to legitimate products from Cuchillo’s manufacturing factories, destined for U.S. companies. A huge deposit into one of his Cayman accounts was perfectly legal—not a laundering scam, as originally thought—and was from the sale of a ranch he had owned in Texas. And the death of a nearby drug supplier they were sure was a hit ordered by Cuchillo turned out to be a real traffic accident involving a drunk driver. Much of the other data on which they’d based the terminate order remained ambiguous.
    Billings had hoped that Adam, on the ground in Sonora, might have seen something to confirm their belief that Cuchillo ran the cartel.
    But apparently not.
    Harris licked the whipped cream again. Caught a few sprinkles in the process.
    Billings looked him over again. Yes, weasely, but this wasn’t necessarily an insult. After all, a sneaky weasel and a noble wolf weren’t a lot different, at least not when they were sniffing after prey.
    Harris asked bluntly, “So, do I tell Adam to go forward?”
    Billings took a bite of scone. He had the lives of the passengers of the bus to save … and he had his career to think of, too. He considered the question as he brushed crumbs. He’d studied law at the University of Chicago, where the theory of cost-benefit analysis had largely been developed. The theory was this: you balanced the cost of preventing a mishap versus the odds of it occurring and the severity of the consequences if it does.
    In the Cuchillo assassination, Billings had considered two options: Scenario One: Adam kills Cuchillo. If he’s not the head of the cartel and is innocent, then the bus attack happens, because somebody else is behind it. If he’s guilty, then the bus incident doesn’t happen and there’d be no bus incidents in the future. Scenario Two: Adam stands down. Now, if Cuchillo’s innocent, the bus incident happens. If he’s guilty, the bus incident happens and there’ll be more incidents like it in the future.
    In other words, the hard and cold numbers favored going forward, even if Cuchillo was innocent.
    But the obvious downside was that Billings could be crucified if that was the case … and if he and Harris and Adam were discovered.
    An obvious solution occurred to him.
    Oh, this was good. He finished the scone. “Yeah, Adam’s green-lighted. But there’s just one thing.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Tell him however he does it, all the evidence has to be obliterated. Completely. Nothing can trace the incident back here. Nothing at all.”
    And looking very much like a crossbreed, a weasel-wolf, Harris nodded and sucked up the last of the whipped cream. “I have no problem with that whatsoever.”

     
    Díaz and Evans were back in the apartment in a nice section of Hermosillo, an apartment that was paid for by a company owned by a company owned by a company whose headquarters was a post office box in Northern Virginia. Evans was providing not only the technical expertise but most of the money as well. It was the least he could do, he’d joked, considering that it was America that supplied most of the weapons to the cartels; in Mexico it is virtually impossible to buy or possess weapons legally.
    The time was now nearly five p.m. and Evans was reading an encrypted email from the U.S. that he’d just received.
    He looked up. “That’s it. We’re green-lighted.”
    Díaz smiled. “Good. I want that son of a bitch to go to hell.”
    And they got back to work, poring over data-mined information about Cuchillo’s life: his businesses and associates and employees, household staff, his friends and mistresses, the restaurants and bars where he spent many evenings, what he bought, what he downloaded, what computer programs he used, what he enjoyed listening to, what he ate and drank. The information was voluminous; security forces here and in the U.S. had been compiling it for months.
    And, yes, much of this information had to do with books.
    Weaknesses …
    “Listen to