Cort Wesley struggled to make sense of what he was hearing. “No, no, Miguel. My oldest has been in his share of scrapes, but my youngest? Come on, don’t try to tell me this was about
them
.”
“It wasn’t,” Asuna said, almost too softly to hear.
“Miguel, if you don’t start speaking a language I can understand, all the human beer kegs in the world won’t be able to protect you. What went down last night had to be about
something
.”
“Oh, it was,
amigo,
and some
one
too. For sure.”
“You plan on telling me who?”
And Cort Wesley felt his stomach sink to his feet when Asuna answered him.
23
M
EXICO
C
ITY
Ana Callas Guajardo sat in the rear of the presidential limousine, enjoying the cool blast of the air-conditioning. She kept the window cracked open just enough to hear Mexican president Hector Villarreal address a jam-packed crowd in the Zócalo, the capital city’s sprawling open-air plaza reserved for only the most special of events. The Zócalo has been a gathering place for Mexicans all the way back to the Aztecs, serving as the prime location for the major public ceremonies and military performances, anything with great pomp and circumstance. The plaza was enclosed by buildings on three sides and bracketed by towering flagpoles showcasing the Mexican flag billowing in the breeze.
Guajardo had watched many a swearing-in, issuance of a royal proclamation, military parade, and Holy Week ceremony from the rooftop Portal de Mercaderes restaurant, looking east to the entire complex known as the Palacio Nacional. From her vantage point today, in the secured VIP parking area next to an equally famed cathedral, Guajardo could hear the president just fine but couldn’t see him thanks to distance and the shaded stage on which he stood. She had already reviewed his speech carefully, enough to arrange for one particular section not to be loaded onto the teleprompter.
Villarreal reached that part of his speech, stammering briefly before springing into ad-lib format while never covering the subject Guajardo had removed from his prepared words. She could hear the tension in his voice as he struggled to keep his composure and figure out what to say now that there was no speech scrolling before him.
Ana Guajardo slid the window all the way up, the oppressive heat and humidity having become too much to bear. She knew Villarreal’s speech was over when the Zócalo erupted into cheers and applause at the end, followed by music as the president left the stage.
Then, moments later, a security guard yanked open the door so the president could vanish into the air-conditioned cool of his limo.
He sneered at the sight of Ana, shaking his head. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was,
señor presidente
.”
He snickered, pouring himself half a glass of American single-malt scotch whiskey and adding ice cubes. “You make my title sound like a punch line.”
“Because you have turned the office you hold into one.”
Guajardo let her gaze drift out the window again at the crowd dissipating in all directions. From the rooftop restaurant, it would’ve had the look of ants scattering from their nest. She had first watched events in the Zócalo with her father, the great man having chosen to mentor her over her brother, whose behavior had proven a burden for the Guajardo family. Her father had given him innumerable chances, finally renouncing the young man after his embarrassments and indiscretions became too much for the storied family to endure.
As a young girl, Guajardo recalled the Zócalo being little more than a decaying concrete block dotted with light poles and train tracks and a single flagpole rising from the center. By the time her father began bringing her with him to watch major ceremonies from the rooftop he’d personally rented for his guests only, the train tracks and light poles had been removed and the entire Zócalo repaved with pink cobblestones.
Coincidentally, the next time the plaza fell into disrepair was right around the time her father was reduced to a vegetative state thanks to a four-story plunge off his bedroom balcony. As much a testament to him as anything, Ana had personally underwritten the effort to raise the three hundred million dollars needed for a complete repair and upgrade of both the Zócalo and the surrounding buildings. Today it stood as a monument to Mexico’s potential to succeed and thrive with no help whatsoever from the United States, which, in her mind, sought to keep her beloved country impoverished to suit its own ends.
“How did you know I didn’t commit the speech to memory?” Villarreal asked, after taking a hefty sip of whiskey.
For someone who didn’t drink, like Guajardo, the scent was overpowering, reminding her of the antiseptic smell that hung over her father, admittedly preferable to the stench sometimes rising from his diaper. “Because that would have required you giving up time from your precious whores,” she told the president of Mexico.
“My private life is none of your business,” Villarreal said, stiffening. “And, by the way, at least I have one.”
The remark stung her, but Guajardo did her best not to show it. “You should watch your tongue,
señor presidente
.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why? It’s what I made you.”
“Because you have no respect for the office.”
“The office I put you in, you mean. The office you seem determined to disgrace, wasting the efforts and dollars of those I organized to bring our party back to power.”
Guajardo’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, had held office for seventy-one consecutive years until being defeated in 2000 by the leftists. It had been the last election championed by her father, robbing him of much of his power and influence before the fall that robbed him of everything else after another failed election six years later. The election that finally allowed Ana to redeem the family name came in 2012, the time being right and Villarreal making the ideal candidate given that his ambition was matched only by his willingness to accept whatever means led to their mutually desired ends.
“By dollars,” the president of Mexico said to Guajardo, “I believe you mean the ones spent to buy votes, a scandal that has now embroiled my entire administration.”
“Do you have any idea how many supermarket discount cards we had to distribute in the poor regions to bring you to power?”
“What about the other means of coercion that were employed?”
“Please don’t tell me you’re surprised.”
“No,
señora
, just revolted. Everything you touch you leave dirty. But I have no intention of taking the fall for you. I’m going to fight this all the way and, if necessary, expose the corruption at its roots.”
“Is that a threat,
señor presidente
?”
“You went too far and your penchant for excess threatens to bring all of us down.” Villarreal held her gaze smugly, secure in the notion his point had been made. “I guess even your money can’t buy everything.”
“You’re right,
señor presidente
; it can’t buy strength, something you are sorely lacking. You appease the Americans at every turn. You are their lapdog at the expense of your own people, who are fed up with being at the beck and call of the Americans, who care only for their own interests. Who hide behind the lone issue of drugs to rationalize the portrayal of our country as a moral cesspit. But where do they think the guns are coming from that kill our own people because your friends the Americans would prefer all of us dead?”
Villarreal shook his head. “I don’t know what’s more scary: hearing you say that or the fact that you really believe it.”
“Then you’ve chosen sides.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You will soon enough. But you’ve made my decision easy.”
“And what decision is that?”
“I’m going to violate one of the rules of business that I live by, that being to hire people you trust and let them do their jobs. That has clearly not worked out in your case.”
Villarreal leaned forward. “I was elected,
señora
. You didn’t hire me.”
“All the same,
señor presidente
, I’m firing you. Best to admit mistakes quickly instead of pretending they’ll go away on their own.”
“You can quote Steve Jobs all you want, but running a country is still far different from running a company. And the side I’ve chosen is Mexico’s.”
Police sirens began to wail, a pair of officers on motorcycles drawing up even with the limousine on either side, the presidential convoy ready to ease into motion enclosed by a pair of hulking Chevy Suburbans loaded with members of the Mexican Special Police both fore and aft.
“Where did you get your vehicles,
señor presidente
?”
“A gift,” Villarreal said, continuing to sip his drink.
“From the Americans, of course. I come here today because I am in need of one as well.”
“From
me
?”
Guajardo removed an envelope from her handbag. “Just a routine pardon for a prisoner being held at Cereso Prison.”
“Is it a name I know?”
“The last name, anyway: the pardon is for my brother, Locaro.”
Villarreal took the envelope, leaving his gaze on her. “The same brother who threw your father out a fourth-floor window.”
“He’s the only brother I have and it was off the balcony,” Guajardo corrected, “not out a window.”
Villarreal signed the letter inside without regarding it and handed the envelope back to her. “Now, if you’ll excuse me,
señora
…”
Guajardo made no move to reach for the door. “No,
señor presidente,
I will not excuse you.”
The president of Mexico stiffened. “You need something else?”
“Yes,” Ana said, leaving things at that for now.
“If this is about my policies—”
“This has nothing to do with policy. Politics has nothing to do with policy and neither does governing. It’s all about power. The parties I represent spent a dozen years waiting for our return to power, and I don’t dare risk squandering our resurgence now, especially in light of what is to come.”
“And what’s that?”
Guajardo smiled smugly. “Let’s just say that in a very short time your American friends will no longer be in a position to do you any good at all. Too bad you chose the wrong side. Otherwise we could have done business together for a long time to come.”
Villarreal almost laughed. “You’re going to take on the Americans now? Declare war on the United States?”
Guajardo’s smile vanished. “The war I’m about to wage doesn’t require a declaration.”
“Perhaps I should make some calls to Washington to alert them.”
“You better make it fast. Because you are going to resign,
señor presidente.
I will make sure no charges are ever brought against you and that you remain a wealthy man for the rest of your life. You will want for nothing.”
“Except my reputation, my legacy.”
“I’m buying them out to better serve our cause in the wake of what is to come.”
“And what is that exactly?”
Guajardo looked at him without responding.
“You know,” Villarreal resumed, “I always knew you had no heart. Now I see you have no soul.” He paused and sucked in a deep breath that left his face bent in a scowl. “But you’ve gone too far this time, first with the vote buying and now trying to brush me aside. You underestimate me, you have always underestimated me. You will pay for this and you will pay dearly. I will fight you every step of the way.”
“There’s not going to be any fight—it’s much better to resign than have scandal force you from office.”
“A scandal that you perpetuated.”
“No,” Guajardo told him. “I was speaking of something else entirely.”
“And what’s that?”
“Those pictures of you with a prostitute.”
“What?”
“I’ve seen them,
señor presidente.
They’re quite revealing. Not much left to the imagination.”
His face started to pucker in anger, then slowly relaxed to the point where it softened into a narrow smile.
“You would blackmail the president of Mexico?”
“I would extort the man I
made
president of Mexico, because there are some things bigger than both of us.”
Villarreal seemed to think of something and stretched his hand out to add fresh ice to his drink. “I’m a single man. Me sleeping with pretty young women is likely to make me more popular instead of less.” He leaned forward to refill his glass.
“Who said it was a young
woman
those pictures show you with?”
Villarreal stopped his reach halfway to the ice bin. The rocks glass slipped from his fingers, its contents spilling on the thick carpet at his feet.
“You like to believe you’re God, but you’re really the devil, aren’t you?” he asked, lips quivering in anger.
“In my experience,
señor presidente,
they’re very much the same thing.”
Villarreal’s hateful sneer suddenly morphed into a tight grin born of a newfound confidence. “And what do you think the Americans will say when they learn the truth behind my ouster?”
Guajardo’s features flared, her tight hold on her composure relinquished briefly. “Are these the same Americans who would keep us an impoverished nation to suit their own ends? The same Americans who loudly lambaste our drug-ridden culture while secretly celebrating the fact that it keeps us a second-rate people? The same Americans who proclaim their disgust with our immigrant workers while knowing their economy would collapse without the cheap labor we provide? Those Americans?” Guajardo settled herself, barely able to suppress her grin. “Trust me,
señor presidente,
when I tell you they’ll have far more important things on their minds by the time you resign from office and far more pressing problems to contend with.”
Something in her voice, her demeanor, prickled Villarreal’s skin with goose bumps. “What have you done?”
“It’s what I’m
about
to do. If you want to warn your American friends, be my guest. It’s too late for them, and for you.”