the street. Their only crime had been their heritage—
his
heritage.
That thought brought Mano to a disturbing realization. Although he’d never been ashamed of his ancestry, Mano could not truly
say it had ever been a source of pride. Being Latino was something he’d simply learned to endure with dignity, like a handicap.
The revelation shamed him. The people at the rally were his own. He could not escape who he was.
Almost home, Mano stopped where the Jimenez twins had been killed and stared at the pavement. The neighbors had tried to scrub
away the stains, but the concrete was still tinted brown with their blood.
Moving away won’t save my children
, he realized suddenly.
The vigilantes had only one goal: to attack Hispanics. Today it was in the barrios. Tomorrow it could be anywhere. Moving
away from here would not change who they were. As long as these killers were loose, his wife and children were targets.
Until now, Mano had disdained Hispanics like Jo and Ramon who shouted about prejudice and injustice. He’d considered them
whiners, too weak to overcome the adversities fate had dealt them. He still felt Jo and Ramon were wrong about a lot of things,
but they were right about one: those in danger had to defend themselves from the vigilantes. That was something in their cause
he could support.
THE RIO GRANDE INCIDENT:
Month 2, Day 25
In every revolution, patriots rise from the least likely of places. Men and women who have never taken an interest in political
processes become infused with passion. They find a wellspring of duty and devotion they never knew existed within them.
—José Antonio Marcha, 1986
Translated by J. M. Herrera
H enry Evans II stared at the glut of unopened e-mails and sighed. Although it was not yet nine on Monday, he was already exhausted.
Over the last year, Evans had grown pale, overweight, and nearly bald—hardly the look that would help the regional director
of the CIA move up the government services ziggurat. But then again, the last eleven months had been unlike any other in Evans’s
twenty-six-year CIA career.
According to many outsiders, the previous year’s merger of all federal security organizations into the Central Intelligence
Agency was a shrewd power move by President Carleton Brenner—a former CIA director. Promising a leaner, meaner federal security
effort, the president had ordered the FBI, NSA, ATF, and Department of Homeland Security to cease operations as independent
entities.
In reality, the consolidation was a bureaucratic nightmare. The CIA had been forced to keep each organization’s leadership,
setting off endless turf battles. And with the restrictions on domestic surveillance Congress had imposed after the early
excesses of the war on terror, even routine investigations became mired in legal bottlenecks. As a result, Evans had seen
his workload explode and his budget slashed.
The Agency faced another loathsome burden: it had been enlisted to conceal the extent of U.S. military involvement overseas.
The memos circulated by Brenner appointees emphasized this was to keep our enemies in the dark, but Evans knew better. The
American public was the real target of the misinformation campaign.
They aren’t even called wars anymore
, Evans thought,
just another “military intervention.”
When his desk phone rang, Evans glared at the archaic device, galled that the CIA was still saddled with voice-only telephones.
Congress had cut the upgrade to vu-phones from the consolidation budget. After several rings, Evans listlessly reached for
the phone. “Evans,” he answered mechanically.
“G’morning, Hank. It’s Maria Prado. I’ve got a report for you on a rally in East L.A. Saturday. There are some new bogeys
on our radar screen you should know about. I e-mailed you a photo of them just a few minutes ago.”
A veteran field agent, Prado had been hounding Evans for weeks with reports on the disturbances in